Eleni Karaindrou

Music for Films was the first ECM album by the Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, released in 1991. It gathers seventeen short pieces written between 1979 and 1990 for the cinema, most of them for the films of Theo Angelopoulos. It opened a long series of ECM albums drawn from her film and theatre scores. Her melodies are rooted in Greek song and move at the slow pace of the images they were written for.

Karaindrou was born in Teichio, a mountain village in central Greece, and studied piano and theory in Athens. Forced to leave by the military junta in 1967, she studied ethnomusicology in Paris before returning home. Her music for Christoforos Christofis's Wandering (1979) marked a turning point. The album draws on that film and his Rosa (1982), on Lefteris Xanthopoulos's Happy Homecoming, Comrade (1986), and on three Angelopoulos films. These are Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper and Landscape in the Mist. All the music was recorded at Polysound in Athens, and five pieces were re-recorded in 1990. Manfred Eicher shaped the sequence and remixed the material in Athens in August 1990 with Karaindrou and engineer Yannis Smyrneos.

The ensemble is small and Greek: santouri, oboe, clarinet, accordion, harp, French horn and a string orchestra conducted by Lefteris Chalkiadakis, with Karaindrou herself on piano. Jan Garbarek adds tenor saxophone to four tracks. His long lines over strings and santouri open the album in Farewell Theme, from The Beekeeper, which returns at the end in a second version. In Adagio, from Landscape in the Mist, a solo oboe carries the theme over the strings. In Rosa's Song Karaindrou sings, before a brief improvisation for piano and saxophone on the farewell and waltz themes.

In the notes to the later Eternity and a Day, ECM recalled that the album "focussed primarily upon the director's great 'Trilogy of Silence'". Since then, combining her themes into albums has been Eicher's work. Reviewing it for ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo wrote that one need not know the films to feel the music. He found her themes "potent yet familiar, even (if not especially) to those who've never heard them before".

This CD is ECM 1429, first released in September 1991, with liner notes by Steve Lake and Wolfram Schütte.