Mikis Theodorakis is legendary Greek composer, born in Chios, Greece on 29th July 1925. He has worked for the Greek as well as international music industry for the last 70 years, contributing close to a thousand songs along the way. He has mostly centered his compositions to 20th century classical Greek music, working in a wide setting of genres. In a career that has been marred by rich musical taste, he has worked in various dimensions of production such as symphonic works, chamber music, cantatas, hymns, operas, stage plays and film scores. His work, in addition to featuring classical Greek poems and literature, is also influenced by his political leanings and struggles which were shaped throughout his life.
In the "Zorba" ballet suite, Mikis Theodorakis uses almost exclusively well-known popular songs which he composed mainly in the 1960s. Some of them have been incorporated in the work as melodies, some of them as vocal pieces. It took twenty years before the composer became his normal self again; he first had to experience the disillusionment at the end of the 1970s concerning the social progress in Greece in order to be finally able to pick up the musical material, continue the compositional impetus of the 1950s and develop an appreciation for the genre of the opera in the mid-eighties which suits his composer's mentality both as a melodist and as a symphonic composer very well.
This large-scale work by Theodorakis sets the poems of Pablo Neruda to an orchestral score.
Music both old and new, but all of it inspired by the timeless modal harmony of medieval and Mediterranean cultures: this is the subject of John Williams's brilliant guitar disc for Sony, which also features his debut as a composer. The main work is his own "Aeolian Suite" for guitar and chamber orchestra, based on both original and 14th-century tunes (one of which, the "Saltarello," appeared on early-music pioneer David Munrow's disc called Instruments of the Middle Ages). The suite is a lovely piece of writing, deftly composed, and neither tacky nor pretentious. It's paired with an inspired assortment of spiritually related but diverse arrangements and original pieces by Satie, Theodorakis, Domeniconi, and an emotionally intense four-movement work called "Stélé," by Australian composer Phillip Houghton. Naturally, Williams performs each piece expertly, but most important, he makes his instrument sing, and that's just what the music demands. Simply super.