Nana Mouskouri shot to the top with ‘My Love is Somewhere.’

HELBI

Nana Mouskouri is bidding farewell to an almost 50-year international career in song with two concerts in Athens this coming week, on Wednesday and Thursday. The girl with the long dark hair and glasses, who learned to sing in the cinema in Koukaki where her father was a projectionist, began her meteoric rise in 1959 when she sang “My Love is Somewhere,” with music by Manos Hadjidakis and lyrics by Nikos Gatsos, at the first Thessaloniki Song Festival. This meeting between Mouskouri, Hadjidakis and Gatsos changed the music scene in Greece. In 1960, with “Awake, My Love” by Costas Yiannidis (the pseudonym of the Smyrniot classical composer Yiannis Constantinidis), she won first prize at the Mediterranean Song Festival, gaining a passport to Europe. There she met Michel Legrand and Quincy Jones. With Hadjidakis’s “White Rose of Athens” she met with great international success and Nana Mouskouri became established on the world stage. She sang with Charles Aznavour and Harry Belafonte. Her concerts at the Olympia in Paris became major events. Nana Mouskouri was Hadjidakis’s favorite singer, and she was also President Constantine Karamanlis’s favorite. He attended her triumphal concert at the Herod Atticus Theater in 1974 after the restoration of democracy. More than 350 of her records have gone gold and platinum, making Greek song known across five continents. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, she has sold more than 300 million records internationally, putting her on a par with the Beatles and Elvis Presley. She has served as a member of the European Parliament and supported the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum. She is also an envoy for peace, along with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.