RECYCLING MEDEA

A film by Asteris Kutulas • Music by Mikis Theodorakis • Choreography by Renato Zanella
cfp award

Mikis Theodorakis

Theodorakis has left a strong and lasting mark on 20th century culture. All across the globe, Theodorakis has enlivened and inspired millions of fans with his music and his unwavering democratic philosophy, a stance that has earned him several stints in prison and exile. By the end of the 1950s, he had already received numerous accolades and highly coveted awards for his symphonic works from peers like Zoltan Kodaly, Pablo Casals, Hanns Eisler, Dimitri Shostakovich and Darius Milhaud. Later on – due to the success of his songs and his score for the Zorbas film – he fell out of favour with the critics, but rose to fame for his underground resistance against the junta in 1967 and his subsequent incarceration. Besides chamber music, opera and symphonies, he has composed almost 1,000 songs. Both his person and his music have always provoked extreme reactions, but Theodorakis himself remains an extremist in thought. While the left considered him right wing, the right saw him as a leftist; while academic music critics dismissed him as a pop musician, pop fans filed him as a classical composer. It goes without saying that he never claimed any of these labels himself.

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  • foto © James Chryssanthes