Vangelis
Themes

Vangelis is the prototype of a complete musical genius: an eclectic composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and successful author. Vangelis is fundamentally a puppet master who operates in the shadows, a refined author of soundtracks and ambient music, a musician who willingly lends his name, not his face.

Greek by vocation, he knocked on the doors of the Temple of Music in the early '70s, when together with two comrades he gave life to the legendary project "Aphrodite's Child," an ensemble capable of forging an absolutely personal idea of rock through the infernal scores of "666," a devilish double album that delights collectors of musical rarities. Having shed the experience of the aphrodisiac commune, Vangelis wasted no time in finding a personal and distinctive musical path: in 1973, having fine-tuned a couple of works still formally raw and uneven, he composed the evocative "L'Apocalypse Des Animaux," which marked the beginning of his illuminating career as a "behind-the-scenes" composer. This is where the first pieces of Vangelis's "Themes" were born, the first indispensable building blocks of a "Greatest Hits" that includes many of the tracks that have accompanied the most evocative visual frescoes of the last three decades. We might all know the music box from "La Petite Fille De La Mer," but few realize they owe it to this Apocalypse and this magnificent author. Likewise, the melancholic jingle of a historic Italian commercial incredibly appears under Vangelis's name, the "Inno" of that "Opera Sauvage" that would arrive six years later along with another small masterpiece like "China," of which "Chung Kuo" and "The Tao Of Love" are admirable and delicate examples. These are the most fervid years for the Greek, years in which the legendary musical frameworks of "Blade Runner" and "Chariots Of Fire" are relentlessly produced: with the famous instrumental of the latter, he won the deserved American Oscar statuette in 1981. "Moments of glory" for Vangelis as well. But he does not linger in basking in the success achieved: in 1985, in between scores of "The Mask," he crafted the little gem of "Antarctica" from the eponymous film, ennobled by minimalist instrumental pieces for keyboards, strings, and percussion.

Vangelis's "Themes" are a work to be experienced, to be internalized. A small, deserved tribute to an often forgotten author hidden by the magnificent indirect advertising of his products (jingles, TV themes, soundtracks), an eclectic and cultured composer intent on making his musical thoughts known through thought itself, without overuse of image.

"Vangelis is by nature something of a recluse: since the early 1970s he has made very few concert appearances, and he prefers to stay out of the public gaze - his music has made its lasting impact largely without the composer himself being visible. This is above all true in film music, the field in which he has been perhaps most influential" (Guy Protheroe)