'Trendy' Nana eyes America

At 64 and with a swag of platinum records, Nana Mouskouri is aiming to tackle the United States. Verena Dobnik reports.

Every night under the Greek stars, a shy 7-year-old would secretly watch an outdoor movie screen as Judy Garland sang her way along the Yellow Brick Road.

The youngster, Nana Mouskouri, would peek out of her bedroom window from a house just behind the outdoor theatre in Athens. She saw The Wizard of Oz over and over, fuzzy and in reverse from the wrong side of the screen. After the audience left, she would sneak out and stand on the small stage, facing the empty seats.

"I dreamed of the heroes I saw in the movies and I pretended I was singing," says Mouskouri.

Since those nights growing up in Greece in the early 1940s, the singer with the trademark square glasses and soaring voice has appeared in the world's top concert halls. Over four decades, album after album has gone gold and platinum, offering love songs in styles ranging from gospel, pop and jazz to folk and classical.

But when Mouskouri's name is mentioned, most Americans still say, "Who?"

And so, at 64, the chanteuse is taking on the United States again, with a new CD of songs from her Concert for Peace at Manhattan's Cathedral of St John the Divine. On that evening, she switched musical gears from a Mahalia Jackson gospel number to Greek songs to Schubert's Ave Maria to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Changes Everything.

The music may not be hip, but Mouskouri has become a trendy diva to drag queens who impersonate her in clubs from Brussels to Los Angeles. And wearing square specs is considered cool for Generation X singer Lisa Loeb.

It's a challenge to seek fresh success in a country where Mouskouri made her recording debut in 1962, with an album produced by Quincy Jones. A year later, she toured with Harry Belafonte.

But for decades, her tours took her to other countries, accompanied by her husband, guitarist George Petsilas. In recent years, divorced and with her two children grown, she was drawn once again to the United States. A 1993 tour was capped by a Carnegie Hall recital, and she returned in a 1997 tour with a new album, Return to Love.

Not being a superstar is a novelty for her.

"This is very tough. And in my position, at this age, after all the successes, it's even harder. But if you want to keep what you have done already, you have to go a little bit further. If you don't, then you go backwards."

Mouskouri's artistry is rooted in childhood memories of the Greek civil war.

"I was so traumatised by this hate that it made me very insecure in life, searching always for love, tenderness, understanding," she says. Her concern for children now also extends to being a Unicef goodwill ambassador.

Her father was the projectionist at the Athens outdoor theatre. And on those nights, watching old movies of the Ziegfeld Follies, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, she understood that art could change people.

Sometimes she would run to the street and peer at the audience arriving, then leaving.

"I always watched the faces. I was trying to find if they were the same coming in and out, after seeing the movie. Are they happy, are they sad? And they were never the same."

This was what art could do. And she was hooked.

While studying classical singing at the Athens Conservatory, she dabbled in popular music.

"I was a rebel and my teacher was very angry at me," she said. "At the end, I was chased away from the conservatory."

She debuted in a nightclub and went on to record hit music for movies such as Never on Sunday and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Although she calls herself "the shyest person in the world," she shunned trends and insisted on singing the music she really felt. Of her varied repertoire, which includes songs by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bette Midler and Nat King Cole, she says, "I'm a musical chameleon."

She has won millions of fans with more than 1000 songs delivered in a dozen languages with an emotion-packed voice.

Being on stage for her is "like walking on a tightrope, crossing from dream to reality."

She calls the stage "my space. The audience and me. My most wonderful love story of all." - NZPA