SINGER Alkistis Protopsalti stares life in the face, refusing point-blanc to hide from what it may have in store. Life is to be lived, with all the good and all the bad.
“Life is a unique, unusual game of emotions,” she tells me ahead of one of her concerts in Cyprus this week (they were sold out and extra performances had to be put on). “All emotions are a blessing, and when there are intense emotions in life it can only mean that you are alive.
“I could never imagine myself wrapped up in a bulletproof jacket in order not to get hurt; I’m the sort of person who sucks life in.”
Protopsalti had a taste of life turning sour when she and her parents were forced to move out of Alexandria in the early 1960s due to the political upheavals in Egypt. She was only six at the time. The uprooting was so traumatic that she remembers it to this day. It was only when she visited Alexandria years later that some of the pain went away.
“The brain is an astonishing ‘hard disc’, a disc that stores everything and doesn’t let you forget a thing. Nothing! That trip was an astounding experience. After that trip I was invited to give a concert at the library of Alexandria. After that it was as if a sponge had gone over all the bad emotions I had kept inside me all those years and cleared them away.”
Whenever Protopsalti hears the word ‘don’t’ she wants to do the complete opposite. Indeed, you get the feeling that upheavals only make her more determined to persevere and succeed. “Life is like a bull I take by the horns and which I make sit down.” You believe her.
This might explain a thing or two about her decision last year to collaborate with Antonis Remos. Asked what she made of all the fuss from her decision to collaborate with a ‘pop’ singer , she simply insists that once she makes up her mind, nothing can stand in her way. “Naturally there were objections but these are things that don’t affect me. As soon as I decide something, I’ll do it no matter what. Something clicked inside me and I knew I had to do it. I like throwing a punch against conformity and following the beat of my heart.”
And she was right: the collaboration proved such huge success there were 185 performances in total: 130 in Athens, 43 in Salonica and 12 in the USA. Not bad for a collaboration most people thought was doomed to failure from the beginning.
But then again everything Protopsalti touches turns to gold. She had her first record Tetralogia at the age of 18, singing songs from poems by Cavafis, Seferis, Karyotakis and Ritsos and music by Dimos Moutsis. Ever since then, she has produced over 25 personal albums, has had 18 collaborations, numerous concerts in England, Spain Cyprus, the USA, Belgium, Germany, Cuba, and Israel.
Protopsalti is undoubtedly one of the public’s most favourite artists of the past three decades, and possibly her greatest achievement is that she manages to be loved as much by the young as she is by the old. “It pleases me very much when I see 15 year-olds expressing themselves through my songs. In one of my last concerts there were some children, around seven or eight years old, standing right at the front, and I could hear them singing with all their strength: Lives don’t just separate this way, of people whom we’ve loved with so much effort, and I thought ‘Look at them, they still haven’t hatched out of their eggs and they’re singing this, without understanding what this song really means!’, but you realise that in some way you express the newer generation. There’s nothing more important than what I call ‘new blood’.”
Fairy Tales of a Voice, the show she came to perform in Cyprus last week, was first performed two years ago at Athens’ Megaron Mousikis with the Presidential Orchestra of Prague, an event that sold out in just eight hours; it was also performed in London with the same success. In Cyprus, she came for six performances – all of which sold out – as guest of the European Limassol Festival, and was accompanied by the Presidential Orchestra of Kremlin with conductor Pavel Ovsyannikov, a large ensemble orchestra and the choir of Diastasis.
Protopsalti says Fairy Tales of a Voice was “a dream come true”. It gave her the opportunity to combine some of her very best Greek songs with music from international films and popular musicals: “Greek songs are my whole life but for the past 26 years singing foreign songs, like ‘Memory’ from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats was something I wanted to do. I kept these songs in my drawer and I hoped that at some point the chance would be given to me to present them in a very beautiful way. I don’t think I could have presented them more beautifully than I have done in Fairy Tales of a Voice.”
As I’m talking to her it becomes extremely clear that she’s immensely proud to be Greek. “I’ve performed in many places around the world and I found it very sad that some thought Greece was a province of Spain or Italy, but there were also extreme examples of people who knew so much about Greece.
“Once I was at a boat in Mexico and the boatman asked me where I was from and when I told him, he exclaimed “Oh, Melina Mercouri!” and I was so shocked he knew who she was! I told him: “But unfortunately she’s dead now” and he took off his hat and put it in the place of his heart, and just remembering that gives me goosebumps.
“Another time when we went to Bolivia, as soon as a customs officer saw our Greek passports he began reciting Homer! There are so many contradictory elements in this world: there are places where people don’t even know where Greece is, and there places where people are reciting in Ancient Greek!”
Music, she says, is one of the most powerful weapons a state can have; with the Olympic Games in Athens this year, Greece should try and make the most of that.
Asked if she had been called to sing at the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 (Protopsalti was the first artist to become a volunteer) she clams up and says: “I’ve had no offer, no. The people in charge know that as soon as you become a volunteer you are at their disposal and they know very well what I can do. I’m waiting for the green light.”
She moves on to her relationship with Stamatis Kraounakis and Lina Likolakopoulou, her main collaborators over the past 16 years: they are more like family than collaborators. And as in all the best families, “there have been huge conflicts… It would be boring for everything to be pink. We all have different personalities and we are all separate units, so inevitably there will be terrible conflicts, but it is through these that you get to know each other better and strengthen the relationship.
“Anyhow creation is born out of such kinds of conflict,” she adds.
But beyond her dreams and her creations, she wants “people to be free, to be able to take breaths when they want to. You can’t wrap a barbed wire around emotional peace. Every one of us finds his/ her own way to forget or to remember, and to fall in love. Each moment is valuable and whatever each person dreams of doing they should try and do.
“The worst thing in life is not doing what you want to do. Do you have any idea how many people come to me after my concerts and say to me ‘Oh, I wanted to become this, I wanted to become that…’? Life flies away at such terrifying speed and if you don’t do what you want now, when are you going to do it?”
And with that it’s clear that Protopsalti is one of the lucky few doing exactly what she wants to do, when she wants to do it, whoever she wants to do it with. She is free, bulletproof jacket or not
