Greek singer Angélique Ionatos died in France
Angélique Ionatos died Wednesday at the age of 67 after a long illness, her son, Alexis Sévenier told AFP on Thursday.
Thomas dom
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Greek singer Angélique Ionatos, who has performed on the biggest stages of France, where she had lived for more than 40 years, died on Wednesday July 7 at the age of 67 following a long illness, announced Thursday to AFP his son, Alexis Sévenier.
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Angélique Ionatos, whose father was a sailor, was born in Athens in 1954. She had left her country with her parents, who had fled in 1969 the dictatorship of the colonels for Belgium, before choosing France.
Her last album, "Reste la Lumière", dated back to October 2015, and the singer gave her last concert at Triton, a club in Les Lilas, in the suburbs of Paris, on April 6, 2018. After the release of her first album in 1972, “Resurrection”, in a duet with her brother Photis, in French, she chose to focus on Greek in her songs.
For a long time,
this performer and composer
had endeavored to defend, with sobriety and purity, but not without a certain theatricality, poems from the Greek heritage, ancient and modern.
Cavafy, Mortayas, Anagnostakis, or even Odysseus Elytis, Nobel Prize for literature in 1979, appeared in his repertoire.
She had unearthed 2,500-year-old Greek poems on one of her albums.
An artist deeply attached to her country of origin and her culture
Angélique Ionatos surrounded herself with musicians from various horizons, such as the double bassist Claude Tchamitchian, known in the world of improvised music, the Argentinian bandoneonist Cesar Stroscio or the violinist Michael Nick.
She could also interpret poems by Chilean Pablo Neruda in Spanish, texts from the diary of famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, or learn tango.
Besides Greek, she could sing in Spanish and French.
If Angélique Ionatos had chosen very early to live in France where she had met at the beginning of her career her future husband, Claude Sévenier - who was the director of the Théâtre de Sartrouville, in the Paris region -, she had remained deeply attached to her country of origin and culture.
His ashes will be scattered in Greece.
(With
AFP
)
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