The digital music pioneer and three-time Grammy nominee additionally labored on 'Blade Runner,' 'Lacking' and 'Alexander.'
Vangelis, the Greece-born composer and digital music pioneer who gained an Academy Award for his synthesizer-laden rating for the Oscar greatest image winner Chariots of Fireplace, has died. He was 79.
Vangelis died Tuesday at a hospital in Paris, his assistant, Lefteris Zermas, informed The Washington Publish. No reason behind dying was revealed.
Vangelis, who started taking part in piano at age 3 however by no means discovered to learn or write music, additionally produced the dystopian rating for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), then reteamed with the director on 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992).
His different big-screen work included Costa-Gavras’ Lacking (1982), the Japanese movie Antarctica (1983), Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty (1984), Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) and Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004).
He turned down many different film provides: “Half of the movies I see don’t want music. It appears like one thing stuffed in,” he as soon as stated.
Vangelis’ music, Spin journal wrote in 1985, “inhabits a world that isn't fairly rock (although his earliest help got here from rock followers), not likely classical (regardless of the plush, virtually symphonic high quality of his synthesizers), and positively not jazz (even when he does make use of improvisation).”
His iconic, space-age theme to Chariots of Fireplace (1981) spent 4 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Sizzling 100 chart; bought 3 million copies inside a 12 months; was nominated for document of the 12 months on the Grammys; and served as background music in the course of the winners’ medal presentation ceremonies on the 2012 Summer time Olympics in London.
“No one believed the movie can be so profitable,” he stated. “Once I wrote the rating, I didn’t write it to be No. 1; I did it as a result of I preferred the individuals I used to be working with. It was a really humble, low-budget movie.”
In a radical concept on the time, Chariots of Fireplace director Hugh Hudson selected Vangelis, a pal, to give you the music for his function that was set in the course of the 1924 Summer time Olympics in Paris.
“It was a dangerous concept, however we went with it relatively than have a interval symphonic rating. It’s develop into iconic movie music — maybe within the prime 10 well-known soundtracks of all time — which is nice as a result of the music is about 30 p.c of a movie,” Hudson stated in a 2011 interview.
Vangelis was born Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou in Volos, Greece, on March 29, 1943. Within the late ’60s, he discovered success as a member of the Greek rock band Forminx after which with the progressive group Aphrodite’s Little one, which had hits with the one “Rain and Tears” in 1968 and the influential album 666 in 1972.
He loved a partnership with Sure lead singer Jon Anderson, and so they launched 4 albums as Jon & Vangelis from 1980 via 1991. (He had been requested to affix Anderson’s prog rock band within the wake of keyboardist Rick Wakeman’s departure however declined.)
Vangelis additionally acquired Grammy noms for greatest new age album for Oceanic in 1998 and Rosetta in 2017.
His 2001 choral symphony Mythodea was utilized by NASA as theme music for the Mars Odyssey mission that 12 months, and he composed music for physicist Stephen Hawking’s memorial in 2018. Extra lately, his 2021 album, Juno to Jupiter, was impressed by one other NASA mission.
He all the time shunned the highlight. “I’ve all the time been anti-success,” he stated. “Usually, after the success of Chariots of Fireplace, I might have instantly rushed to the States and began doing a giant quantity with video applications, excursions and live shows and such. I didn’t do any of that.”