Fifty years in one night
Fifty years is a considerable amount of time to try squeezing into one night, but the veteran composer Mimis Plessas will do his utmost for tomorrow night’s concert at the Herod Atticus Theater, an evening that is bound to bring back memories from the past. Arranged to mark Plessas’s 50th anniversary in the music business, the event, which will be held under the aegis of the Culture Ministry, will feature several singers, from both the older and the younger generation, who have collaborated with the composer. Plessas has selected a career-spanning set for the evening and will be joined by a rotating cast of popular vocalists, these being Marinella, Dimitris Mitropanos, Costas Hadzis, Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Penny Xenaki, and the baritone Spyros Kleissas. The composer, who will be at the podium, has assembled various orchestras for the evening’s requirements. Plessas’s Popular (Laiki) Orchestra, a jazz quartet made up of old collaborators, the European Union’s Youth Orchestra, and Dimitris Papadimitriou’s Friends of Contemporary Music Choir will all perform material by Plessas, while pianist Stephanos Korkolis returns to the limelight as the evening’s soloist. At a news conference earlier this week, Plessas expressed his gratitude to all the guests who will be appearing to honor the artist and his substantial body of work. Since his emergence as a recording artist in 1952, Plessas has produced diverse work, including popular Greek music and music for film and theater, all at an exceptionally prolific rate. Often producing several albums in a year, the 77-year-old’s relentless rate of productivity is unwaning to this very day.
