Savina Yannatou

Vocalist
(Greece)

Savina Yannatou was born in Athens, Greece. She studied voice with Gogo Georgilopoulou and Spiros Sakkas in Athens, and later at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London with a scholarship awarded by Mousigetis Foundation. In 1979, while still a student, she began working as a professional singer collaborating with the composer Lena Platonos in a very popular and nowadays legendary program of the national Greek Radio 3.

Following that, she collaborated with many Greek composers (Platonos, Mamangakis, Kypourgos, Katsoulis, Gregoriou, Marangopoulos, Kamarotos,Kouroupos, a.o.) interpreting songs or participating in Greek contemporary operas and released numerous albums since then. She also was a founding member of an Early Music ensemble in Athens ("Early Music Workshop") in the '80s.

Parallel to this she started a collaboration with six Thessaloniki-based musicians, who at that occasion founded the group «Primavera en Salonico» and with whom she has recorded 9 CDs (five released by LYRA and the last four by ECM Records) so far. They have traveled all over the world since 1996 giving hundreds of concerts at renowned venues and festivals, a.o. at the Barbican and the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Melbourne Concert Hall, the 92nd Street Y and Symphony Space in New York, the London Jazz festival, many WOMAD festivals all over the world, Stern Grove Festival in San Francisco, Moers New Music Festival, Rudolstadt Folk Festival, UCLA in Los Angeles, The Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, and many more. The singer and group have received countless triumphant reviews of CD releases and concerts in major publications all over the world.

Savina Yannatou has also composed her own music and songs, as well as music for theater (a.o. for the National Greek Theatre, National Theater of Northern Greece, Thessalian Theater, Theater of Neos Kosmos, Playback Theater, for plays such as Medea, Bacchae, Ifigenia in Aulis, Dibuk, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Persona, The Suppliants, The Arrival of Ullisses, The woman of Zakynthos ), pantomime theater and video art. She has brought out 25 personal CDs as a singer or songwriter and has participated in over 30 other LPs and CDs.

She also works as a free-jazz vocalist since 1992, having collaborated with Peter

Kowald and Nikos Touliatos and later with Barry Guy(Maya Recordings released the CD Attikos, a live recording of their concert at Bimhuis in Amsterdam in 2010) Floros Floridis and Gunther Baby Sommer (Kommeno Project, CD released by Intakt Records in 2012), Gerald Preinfalk, Klaus Trauheit, Gunther Pitscheider a.o. She is continuing collaborations with music ensembles which find themselves in between categories, such as the Canadian group “Constantinople”, the group “Medea Electronique”and she also continues to work with well-known orchestras and contemporary Greek composers. Occasionally she gives workshops in free vocal improvisation.