Vangelis

Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in Agria in 1943 and raised in Athens, Vangelis improvised at the piano as a small child, refused formal training, and kept to that refusal for the rest of his life. Forminx made him known in Greece; Aphrodite's Child, founded with Demis Roussos, ended in 1971 leaving behind 666, a double album drawn from the Book of Revelation. From studios in Paris and then London he worked largely alone — Heaven and Hell, Albedo 0.39, Spiral, China — composing, playing and producing at once, recording in real time and treating banks of synthesisers as an orchestra with a single player in every chair. Chariots of Fire won the Academy Award for its score and put electronic sound at the heart of a period drama; Blade Runner, 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Antarctica followed, and the Jon and Vangelis albums ran alongside. Mythodea was later taken up by NASA for the Mars Odyssey mission, and Rosetta and Juno to Jupiter continued that line to the end. France made him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, and a minor planet carries his name. He died in Paris in 2022. At the Athens School of Fine Arts he studied music, painting and film direction, and his first film scores, written in 1973 for Frédéric Rossif, began the solo career that the album Earth followed a year later. A contract with RCA and his own Nemo Studios in London lay behind the records of the decades that followed, among them The City of 1990, built from sounds he had gathered in Rome, Voices of 1995 and the score for Oliver Stone's Alexander in 2004. Juno to Jupiter was the twenty-third and last of the studio albums.