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Staying True to Greece While Drawing on Some Wider Influences
By JON PARELES
The Greek singer Eleftheria Arvanitaki, who performed for an adoring crowd on Saturday night at Carnegie Hall, is part of an international sorority of musicians who have merged national traditions with pop. She has collaborated with some of them, including Cesária Évora from Cape Verde, Buika from Spain and Dulce Pontes from Portugal, and in Greece Ms. Arvanitaki is so celebrated that she was chosen to sing her hit“Dynata” (“It’s Possible”; the word also means “strong”) at the closing ceremony of the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
Like her international peers, Ms. Arvanitaki trades some of the rawness of traditional styles for the refinement and variety of pop. She’s a soprano who merges sweetness with fervor, clarity and delicacy with a sense of sorrow and melancholy resolve. To an American listener, she could sound at times like Judy Collins infused with the modes and meters of Greek music. She has the many regional and urban styles of Greece and its neighbors to draw on, particularly the insistent syncopation and gathering crescendos of the urban folk hybrid rebetika, which can be both mournful and fierce… read more here: nytimes.com.
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