UAE newspaper The National has posted a great interview with Yanni. Here he talks about his success and his struggles.
Rob Garratt writes:
“There was a time, not so long ago, when Yanni disappeared without a trace. At the height of his record-breaking, famous monument-ticking, mid-1990s success, Yanni suddenly walked away from it all.
The Greek composer of swirling, innocuously uplifting instrumental music – who will perform for the first time in Abu Dhabi on Thursday and Friday – had, in his own words, “burnt out”.
“I was pretty convinced I wasn’t going to be coming back,” says 61-year-old Yanni, speaking from his home in Florida. “I found that there is a line where if you cross it, you burn out – and I found it out by crossing it.”
On the eve of a 1998 Latin American tour, Yanni pulled the plug. His gargantuan touring juggernaut had got too much – a year earlier, he had performed record-breaking gigs at India’s Taj Mahal and the Forbidden City in China, two months apart.
He fled to his parents’ home back in Greece – he did not touch a piano for a year or give interviews for two years.”
Read the complete interview here.