Savina Yannatou Concert in LA, Sunday March 6th PRESS OFFICE CONSULATE GENERAL OF GREECE IN LOS ANGELES PRESS RELEASE February 8th, 2005 CONCERT IN LOS ANGELES Savina Yannatou & Primavera en Salonico, on tour in the USA, will perform live on Sunday, March 6th, 7 pm, at UCLA Live Schoenberg Hall. Savina Yannatou made her ECM debut with the live album TERRA NOSTRA. Released early in 2003, it alerted the world's press to the work of this exceptional Greek singer and her maverick band of free-thinking musicians, Primavera en Salonico. Now SUMIGLIA, Yannatou's first ECM studio album, takes the music to another level. Pooling songs from Greece, Corsica, Italy, Sicily, Galicia, Palestine, Albania, Bulgaria, Armenia, Moldavia and the Ukraine, SUMIGLIA both celebrates the differences between the traditions and the common ground they share. The musicians reveal a deep feeling for the melodies they explore, treat them with great respect, and when the music seems to demand it, follow their implications until increasingly free improvisation becomes an inevitability. As one Greek critic wrote, "Savina Yannatou and the musicians of Primavera en Salonico are rope-dancers on the chord which connects the modal music of the East with the equivalent music of Western Europe, music of the Middle Ages and the popular polyphonies of the Mediterranean". Savina Yannatou was born in Athens where she studies at the national Conservatory and Spiros Sakkas' Workshop of Vocal Art in Athens. On a scholarship from the Mousigetis Foundation, she attended England's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. An early collaboration with renown Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis led to further adventures with modern music; she also has experience of baroque and renaissance performance styles. In the early 1990s she began experimenting with free improvisation, eventually forming a cooperative trio with German bassist Peter Kowald and Greek clarinettist/saxophonist Floros Floridis. Since 1993 Yannatou has performed with Primavera en Salonico, the collective of Thessaloniki-based musicians originally assembled for a project that collected Sephardic folk songs. A number of recordings for Lyra (a label that is also ECM's Greek distributor) followed. Savina Yannatou has also composed music for theatre, video art and dance, and has contributed to more than 20 albums released in her homeland since 1979. 12424 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 710 Los Angles CA. 90025 Tel.: (310) 826-4749 Fax: (310) 826-3532 Email: lapressoffice@greekembassy.org Tickets: Call the UCLA Central Ticket Office at 310-825-2101, visit UCLALive.org, or any Ticketmastet outlet.