Yanni Is Still Chilling, 25 Years After the Acropolis

1953

New York Times has great story called “Yanni Is Still Chilling, 25 Years After the Acropolis”. It is a great read for anyone who is into music history. It is not just for dedicated Yanni fans.

It starts like this:

“The mustache is back. Yanni, the Greek-American god of sweeping, symphonic-ish musical light syrup, says he goes back and forth about keeping his signature facial flourish. He shaved it off a few years ago; it’s disconcertingly absent from the cover of his 2016 album “Sensuous Chill.”

But last weekend here, it had returned to its rightful spot, framed by the familiar, gentle cascades of shoulder-length hair. (I regret to inform you that, at 63, Yanni is thinning on top.)

All this hair has been kept the same dark, dark brown it was 25 years ago, on Sept. 25, 1993, when Yanni gambled his savings to organize a concert of his music at the Acropolis in Athens, backed by a full orchestra and, crucially, filmed live. Promoted heavily — some might say sadistically — by PBS in the years that followed, the film was his breakthrough: It drove seven million sales of the album version and helped make the world safe for the similarly soft-drama, lushly instrumental sounds of “Riverdance,” Enya and Lindsey Stirling.

“They overplayed it, I felt,” Yanni said of his pledge drive pre-eminence backstage at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts before playing here last Saturday, part of a three-month Acropolis anniversary tour that brings him to Radio City Music Hall this Saturday and across the country through Aug. 5. He mimicked what he’d yell at Yanni-drunk PBS affiliates: “Stop playing it!””

Read the complete story in New York Times