The Greek Byzantine Choir

The Greek Byzantine Choir was founded in 1977 by Lykourgos Angelopoulos and his collaborators, with the aim of studying and presenting Byzantine music as preserved through written and oral tradition. The choir also sought to safeguard the authentic Byzantine tradition and free it from the influence of Western music.

It gave over a thousand performances, participating in liturgies and other services in Greece and in around thirty countries across Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. A landmark event was its participation in the Pan-Orthodox Christmas Divine Liturgy in Bethlehem in 2000, celebrating two thousand years since the Birth of the Savior.

Since 1993, nine albums have been released under the choir’s name in France and Greece, along with numerous recordings and books.

Members of the choir included (in alphabetical order): Antonios Aetopoulos, Kostas Angelidis, Andreas Chronis, Vassilis Georgaras, Alexis Giannakopoulos, Artemios Giannakos, Yiorgos Konstantinou, Panagiotis Koutras, Leonidas Lioumis, Anastasios Mentakis, Damianos Serefoglou, Yannis Tsiotsiopoulos, Vassilis Zacharis, Dimitris Zaitidis.

Songs

Records

Live recording of the tribute concert for Domna Samiou’s seventieth birthday, at The Megaron, the Athens Concert Hall, in 1998.

Concerts

Invited by Lina Lalandi, founder of the English Bach Festival and clavichordist, Domna Samiou made five appearances in the festival, presenting, in what could be the first time, the authentic traditional music of Greece to the English audience.
An Asia Minor tribute concert. A tribute to the muse of the historical space of the Greek East. Traditional songs from the western coast of Asia Minor, the Sea of Marmara, Constantinople, Pontus and Cappadocia and two Byzantine hymns from the musical tradition of the Orthodox Church.
A great concert called ‘The known and unknown Domna’, part of the series ‘Bridges’; a tribute concert for her seventieth birthday. Some of her closer friends and collaborators were invited as guests: Lykourgos Angelopoulos, Dionysis Savvopoulos, Eleftheria Arvanitaki as well as the two distinguished Turkish musicians Fahrettin Çimenli and Volkan […]