One of the most esteemed teachers of Byzantine Music in the world, Protopsaltis Lykourgos Angelopoulos, reposed this morning, Sunday 18 May 2014, at the age of 73. He was the first chanter of the Church of Saint Irene of Aiolou in Athens for over 30 years and his funeral will take place there this Wednesday morning, May 21.
Homage
Lykourgos A. Angelopoulos was born in Pyrgos, Peloponnesus in 1941. He studied Byzantine Music at the School of National Music, under the tutelage of the great musician and musicologist, Simon Karas, and Law at the University of Athens. Since 1982, he has been the "Protopsaltis" (first chanter) at the Church of Saint Irene in Athens (first Cathedral). Since 1977, he is the founder and director of the Greek Byzantine Choir and professor of Byzantine Music at the Nikos Skalkotas Conservatory and at the Philippos Nakas Conservatory in Athens. He is the director of the Children's Byzantine Choir of the Archdiocese of Athens since its foundation and the director of the School of Byzantine Music at the Dioceses of Ilia, Rethymnon and Fthiotidos. He is a member of the artistic committee reponsible for the music schools of the Ministry of Education since 1998 and from 2005 he is the president of KSYME and founding member of the "Charta of Regas".
He has collaborated with the Athens Radio Broadcast on programs related to Byzantine Music and has performed contemporary music composed by Michalis Adamis, John Tavener, Dimitrios Terzakis, Georgios Kyriakakis, Theodoros Antoniou and Kyriakos Sfetsas. He is a member of the research team headed by Marcel Peres in France, which studies the old western chants and their relationship to the byzantine ones. He has performed byzantine, old roman, ambrosian and other old western chants in recordings with the Ensemble Organum in France. He has recorded 8 CDs with them.
In 1994, he was honoured by his All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I with the Patriarchal Offikion and was named Archon Protopsaltis (First Chanter) of the Holy Archdiocese of Constantinople. He has also been honoured by his Beautitude the Patriarch of Jerusalem Diodoros, by the Orthodox Church of Finland and by the Diocese of Patras in Greece. The Holy Synod of Greece awarded him with the Golden Cross of the Apostle Paul in 2006. The president of the Hellenic Republic awarded him in 2004 with the honorary distinction of the Silver Cross of the order of the Phoenix.
Read more here.