Yannatou hailed in Australia
A fixture on the foreign concert circuit in recent years with an accumulating number of well-received performances throughout Europe as well as in the US, the gifted vocalist Savina Yannatou and her backing ensemble Primavera en Salonico have now stretched their work’s reach to the faraway Antipodes – and impressed there too. A recent concert review published in the respected Australian daily The Age, covering Yannatou’s first-ever show in Australia, at the Melbourne Concert Hall, noted that «Yannatou’s musicianship is extraordinary.» Referring to the act’s eclectic repertoire, mostly from the Mediterranean basin, and willingness to experiment with tradition, the reviewer remarked «you sense a political undercurrent of deliberately crossing cultural frontiers and rivalries. Her music and her style might be called levantine Womad,» adding that the versatile Yannatou is a «chameleon, playful, sexy, and richly endowed with musical intelligence. She is an astonishing artist and I hope she sings for us again.» Yannatou, Greece’s first artist to perform at the Womad festival, in 1996, has released three acclaimed studio albums with Primavera en Salonico since the mid-1990s, and a live recording early this year. Both Yannatou and her musicians have displayed a growing willingness to experiment along the way. She is now preparing an album of Manos Hadjidakis songs.
