Thanos Mikroutsikos

Who is Thanos Mikroutsikos?

Athanasios Mikroutsikos, born in Patras, Greece, is one of the leading composers of popular and classical music in his home country. He studied music theory and piano at the Patras Philharmonic Society and at the Greek Conservatory and continued under Yiannis A. Papaioannou. While studying music he graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the University of Athens.

He blends a lot of musical traditions in his work, from popular to electronic. He has composed a lot of songs based on poems by Greek and foreign poets, such as Euripides, Aristophanes, Constantine P. Cavafy, Giorgos Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, Odysseas Elytis and Nikos Kavvadias as well as Bertolt Brecht, Nazim Hikmet, Wolf Biermann, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Maurice Maeterlinck. He has also written operas, symphonic music, chamber music and music for the theatre and cinema.

One of his most popular works was the setting to music of poems by Nikos Kavvadias in his albums Grammes Orizonton and Stavros tou Notou. Some of the music was originally written for a TV series, the theme of which was marine. The songs were liked and he went on to the studio to record some more many of which were included in the aforementioned albums.