Greek pop icon Anna Vissy thrilled 65,000 people at a concert held at the Panathenaic Stadium on Saturday night. Fans from every age group sang and danced at the tunes that have made the 66-year-old Vissy the ultimate star throughout her distinguished career.
“I have experienced very emotional feelings. In my life I have received success and recognition, but also doubt. But being 66 years old, as I am today, and entering an overflowing Panathenaic Stadium is something else,” Vissy said after the concert.
The pop star paid tribute to Greek Composer Mimis Plessas who passed away hours before the concert aged 99. She sang “Tha pio apopse to feggari” one of the greatest songs written by Plessas and originally sung by Giannis Poulopoulos.
“The real artist has no age. Nobody has an age. So if you reach 60, you expect to die? No,” Vissy said and added: “I don’t think about the title ‘absolute Greek star’, I don’t feel it as a burden. It’s nice, it honors me, but I don’t live with it.”
Anna Vissy’s journey into the Greek music scene
Vissy a Greek Cypriot singer and songwriter studied music at conservatories and performed locally before moving to the professional scene in Athens, in 1973, where she signed with Minos and simultaneously collaborated with other musical artists and released promotional singles of her own while studying at the University of Athens.
Vissi established herself in the recording industry by winning the Thessaloniki Song Festival in 1977 with the song “As Kanoume Apopse Mian Arhi” and releasing the eponymous debut album.
Since the 1980s, Vissi began a nearly exclusive collaboration with songwriter Nikos Karvelas, to whom she was married from 1983 to 1992 and had one child with, resulting in one of the most successful music partnerships in the nation’s history.
Throughout her career she has released over two dozen albums, most of which have been certified at least gold in the two countries and has also starred in three theatrical productions and briefly ventured into television and radio.
Vissi experimented with different styles of music; after becoming one of the first Greek artists to introduce Western pop and dance elements into Greek laïko and entehno, she became one of the most prominent portrayers of the laïko-pop hybrid genre and culture that was thriving from the mid-1990s into the mid-2000s.
Since 2015 and for nine consecutive years, Anna Vissi has a successful residency in Hotel Ermou Club in Athens. In 2018 and 2019, she performed the same show with success in Thessaloniki’s “Barbarella” night club and toured extensively during all summers in Greece, Cyprus and around the world.
