Nana Mouskouri
|
May 10, 2018 at 7:30 PM
Nana Mouskouri has never dwelled on numbers and has humbly left praise aside, along with the 300 gold and platinum discs that have punctuated her glorious career. While she's looking away, let's mention that the Singer -- as her husband and producer André Chapelle tenderly calls her -- sold about 350 million albums. A wonder that enabled her to rank second, behind Madonna but before Céline Dion, of the best-selling female recording artists of all time. In 2018, Nana will celebrate her 60 years of success in music, and she just recorded her 134th album. 134 albums, 42 of which in French, 33 in English, and 26 in German.
"I often wonder what she would have done, had music not existed", Charles Aznavour muses about Nana Mouskouri.
A life without singing is quite simply inconceivable. "I would have become a criminal…” she claims directly. Music is not a choice, it is self-evident. It is not just a passion, it is her very self. Her blood, her laughter and her tears, her soul and her heart, music is everything she is. The stage is her land of welcome and her only way in life. Nana Mouskouri went into singing as some go into the Church. She took the veil, though a diaphanous one, chiffon or silk. But the desire to attain to the absolute is quite the same. Each show is a port of call that transforms her. The life of a woman singer is a crossing she shares with so many travelling companions: the audiences who welcome her, the musicians who follow her on the road, the composers and songwriters who feed her.