Composer scored Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner
Vangelis composer b March 29, 1943 d May 17, 2022
Vangelis, who has died aged 79, was a self-taught, Oscar-winning composerwho piloted a dashboard of synthesisers through the New Age and into the cinema, most notably with catchy scores for Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner.
Chariots of Fire (1981) was Vangelis’ first studio feature, and it won him an Academy Award – beating John Williams’ traditionally orchestral Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film also won an Oscar for best picture, for its crowd-pleasing story of British runners representing their country in the 1924 Olympic Games, and opened with an iconic image of the young men running in slow-motion along a beach.
The score brought Vangelis fame, and the soundtrack became the fastest-selling LP at the time. Its theme remains one of the most recognisable – and parodied – in filmmusic history, with Mr Bean actor Rowan Atkinson performing it at the opening of the London Olympics in 2012.
Vangelis cemented his cinematic legacy the next year with Blade Runner, drafting a grand, glacially advancing opus for Ridley Scott’s neo-noir sci-fi film – a failure in its day that went on to become a classic and inspire a 2017 sequel.
Scott visited Vangelis every night as he was cutting the film in London and remembered vividly his reaction when he first heard the composer’s musical idea for the opening shot, a stunning aerial of a future Los Angeles broiling against the night sky. ‘‘Honestly, my hairs stood on end,’’ Scott said in 2017. ‘‘He was the soul of the movie.’’
The score became an exemplar in the genre and continued to influence bands and film composers decades later.
Vangelis began his musical career in rock’n’roll, first as a songwriter and organist for Greece’s first popular rock band, the Forminx, which he formed in high school.
He moved to Paris after the 1967 military coup in Greece and co-founded the progressive rock band Aphrodite’s Child, which released three successful albums that collectively sold more than 20 million copies in Europe.
‘‘It was too sophisticated for the group,’’ he said of their ambitious album 666, in a 1974 interview with Sounds. ‘‘I realised that I couldn’t follow the commercial way any more; it was very boring.’’
The band split in 1974, and Vangelis moved to London tomake solo albums – including Heaven and Hell, Spiral and the more avant-garde Beaubourg.
The band Yes invited him to join when its keyboardist Rick Wakeman left, but Vangelis, as he told Keyboard Magazine in 1982, found the group incompatible.
He made several albumswith the band’s lead vocalist, Jon Anderson. Billed as Jon and Vangelis, they produced two hit singles in the UK: I Hear You Now (1979) and I’ll Find My Way Home (1981).
In music stores, the composer’s solo workwas shelved in the burgeoning New Age genre, with peers including Mike Oldfield, Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream. A key difference was melody.
‘‘Vangelis is the master of the sweeping, melodic statement,’’ Paul Haslinger, once of Tangerine Dream, told NPR in 2016.
‘‘Whether you like this opulent, symphonic sound or not, the melodies catch – and if you’ve ever tried anything in music, you know how hard that is.’’
While others were experimenting with modular, sequenced rhythms, Vangelis played his synthesisers like a church organ, drenching big melodies in massive, artificial reverb to create the feeling of sound in a cathedral. He also devised a system that allowed him to play multiple synthesiser voices at once – turning his keyboards into a full orchestra – and typically recorded pieces in one pass.
‘‘I won’t even rerecord a thing if I play a bum note,’’ he told Beat Instrumental in 1975. ‘‘Making music is like making love – it’s not good unless it’s honest and spontaneous.’’
His music connected the sacred spacewith outer space – a quality that made it a natural fit for the movies. His first effortswere for French documentaries and the 1970 film Sex-Power, and his album music provided much of the score for Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS series Cosmos.
In 1982, he scored Missing, CostaGavras’ Oscar-nominated drama about an American writer who disappears in Chile.
In 1992, Vangelis reteamedwith Scott for the Columbus epic 1492: Conquest of Paradise. His last major scorewas for Oliver Stone’s ill-received Alexander (2004), about Alexander the Great, the Greek conqueror of the ancient world.
Outside film, Vangelis wrote two scores for the London Royal Ballet in the mid1980s, and continuedmaking solo albums through the 1990s and 2000s. He provided music for high-profile occasions, including the Olympic Games in 2000 and 2004.
In 2001 he wrote a symphonic oratorio, Mythodea, to commemorate Nasa’s mission to Mars – a production staged in Athens and criticised in the Greekmedia because it cost US$7 million, half of which was supplied by the government.
In 2016, he released a synth album, Rosetta, inspired by the European Space Agency’s probe mission of the same name.
Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou was born in Volos, northeast of Athens, and grew up in the capital. His father was ‘‘in property’’, he told the Los Angeles Times, and was ‘‘a great lover of music’’. Vangelis began playing the piano at 4 but received little formal training.
He received his first Hammond organ as a teenager, and painted it gold.
Aftermoving to London in 1974, he built his hi-tech Nemo Studios, and began going by the name Vangelis because, as he told Sounds, Papathanassiou was ‘‘impossible to fit’’ on record sleeves and hard for English speakers to pronounce.
Vangelis granted few interviews and, in them, revealed little personal information. By all accounts, he had three serious romantic partners and no children.
He was recalled by friends as a funloving bear of aman with a hearty appetite for cigars, wine and practical jokes.
Anderson, recounting his first meeting with Vangelis in Paris, told the Washington Post: ‘‘As I walked in, he had a long bow and some arrows, which he proceeded to fire down the very big hallway. The arrowswent through the very large curtainedwindow.
‘‘I explained he could kill someone, and he just laughed, saying he was Greek. ‘Don’t worry, Jonny.’ ’’ –