An award-winning composer whose global stature stems from extensive work across cinema, television, and theater, Eleni Karaindrou forged her most enduring partnership with director Theo Angelopoulos, a collaboration lasting more than two decades that concluded only with his death in 2012. In addition to numerous Greek filmmakers, she has supplied scores for Chris Marker, Jules Dassin, and Margarethe von Trotta, bringing her total film output beyond twenty titles. More than a dozen television and radio productions, together with over fifty stage works, further comprise her catalog. Critics and audiences across Greece and Europe have long singled out two traits in her film music: every director with whom she has collaborated treats music as “inseparable” from a film’s images, as demonstrated by 1995’s Ulysses’ Gaze, while the scores themselves consistently fuse modern classical language with the folk instruments and modalities of antiquity, exemplified by 2014’s Medea.
Karaindrou’s engagement with Greek cultural heritage extends to formal academic training; she holds master’s degrees in both history and archaeology. Although her theatrical output centers on contemporary playwrights, she has also composed for modern adaptations of Aristophanes. Her ethnomusicological studies and radio experience have led her to champion the survival of ancient instrumental and vocal traditions, a commitment reflected in her habitual deployment of the santouri and clarinet as principal voices.
Born in the mountain village of Teichio, Karaindrou relocated to Athens at the age of seven, encountering automobiles, electricity, radio, and cinema for the first time. Her apartment overlooked an open-air cinema whose screenings she could watch from her bedroom window; nearby, a Byzantine church choir’s voices carried through the neighborhood. These surroundings, combined with her introduction to the piano, established the central artistic passions that would define her life. She pursued piano and music theory at the Hellenikon Odion. During the Greek military junta of 1967–1974 she resided in Paris, where she studied ethnomusicology with particular attention to Greek traditions, learned orchestration, and performed improvisations alongside jazz musicians while beginning to write popular songs. Despite her formal education, she describes herself as largely instinctive and self-taught. Upon returning to Greece she established the Laboratory for Traditional Instruments at the ORA Cultural Centre. Her first album, the 1975 song cycle The Great Vigil, set Greek poetry and featured Maria Farantouri as vocalist. That same year she scored her initial film, Dimitris Mavrikios’s documentary Polemonta, followed shortly by Takis Kanellopoulos’s feature Chronicle of Sunday.
Karaindrou first encountered Theo Angelopoulos in 1982 after her score for Hristoforos Hristofis’s Rosa received the Thessaloniki International Film Festival award, with Angelopoulos serving as jury chair. Their initial recorded collaboration was the 1984 film Voyage to Cythera; two years later The Beekeeper featured saxophonist Jan Garbarek as soloist. Having followed ECM recordings closely since the mid-1970s, Karaindrou has repeatedly engaged label artists Garbarek and violist Kim Kashkashian, as well as longtime oboist Vangelis Christopoulos; she has recalled that the first time she heard Christopoulos his tone moved her to tears. Further joint projects with Angelopoulos included 1988’s Landscape in the Mist. In 1990 her score for Von Trotta’s L’Africana appeared on Milan to widespread European praise. That year she also signed with ECM, which released the first three Angelopoulos scores as Music for Films in January 1991; the following year The Suspended Step of the Stork appeared. Ulysses’ Gaze, again featuring Kashkashian, was issued in 1995; the film, starring Harvey Keitel, marked Angelopoulos’s first wide American release and introduced Karaindrou’s music to North American listeners. In 1996 the Lyra label compiled her soundtracks for Rosa/Wandering.
Angelopoulos’s 1998 film Eternity and a Day, which received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, further elevated her international profile. Although primarily associated with Greek cinema, she has also worked with other prominent European directors such as Dassin and Marker. In 2001 her score for Antonis Antypas’s staging of Euripides’ Trojan Women premiered at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus before an audience of fifteen thousand; fifteen additional performances followed throughout Greece and Cyprus. ECM released the recording the next year, showcasing a full choir and extensive folk instrumentation. The 2004 score for Angelopoulos’s Oscar-nominated The Weeping Meadow also earned a European Film Award nomination. In 2005 she presented the concert retrospective Elegy of the Uprooting, later issued by ECM in 2006. Framed as a scenic cantata at Athens’s Megaron, the program wove together themes from thirteen scores spanning more than two decades, performed by choir, vocalist Maria Farantouri, and the Camerata Orchestra under Alexandros Myrat. Her final soundtrack for Angelopoulos, Dust of Time, appeared in 2008. In 2010 the Greek television score The 10 was released jointly by Mikri Arktos and ECM; that same year Concert in Athens captured a live performance of earlier theater music featuring Christopoulos, Kashkashian, Garbarek, and the composer herself. Following Angelopoulos’s death in a car accident in 2012, the Athens concert recording was issued in 2013.
Karaindrou continued her association with stage director Antypas. For his 2014 production of Euripides’ Medea at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus she assembled a small all-Greek ensemble combining santouri, ney, lyra, and clarinets to evoke both archaic and contemporary textures. Giorgos Cheimonas’s modern Greek adaptation supplied the text, sung by a fifteen-voice chorus directed by Antonis Kontogeorgiou and, on two selections, by the composer. Recorded live, the score was released by ECM in 2014. The same year Mirkis Arktos issued Music for the Small Screen: Original Recordings (1976-1989), a compilation of her television work.
ECM presented the stage cantata for David in 2016, a setting of an eighteenth-century verse play from Chios. Karaindrou bridged historical periods through music for mezzo-soprano, baritone, instrumental soloists, choir, and orchestra; Kashkashian’s viola lines echoed her earlier writing for Ulysses’ Gaze while the vocal writing drew on baroque opera conventions, spotlighting singers Irini Karagianni and Tassis Christoyiannopoulos. In 2019 Tous Des Oiseaux gathered scores for Wajdi Mouawad’s play of the same name and Payman Maadi’s film Bomb, A Love Story. The collection was praised for its probing treatment of cultural identity; Bomb marked her first cinematic project after Angelopoulos’s death and received an Asia Pacific Screen Award nomination for Best Original Score. Both works employ string orchestra and Karaindrou’s regular soloists, including vocalist Savina Yannatou. ECM released Tous Des Oiseaux in early 2019.
