BIOGRAPHY

Larkos Larkou was born on 6.2.1973 in Cyprus and comes from the village of Kontea in Famagusta. He is a composer, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, sound engineer, producer and educator. He is a guitarist and self-taught on instruments such as lute, mandola, bouzouki, oud, banjo, bass, ethnic percussion and others.

He has composed more than 1000 songs to his own lyrics or to the poetry of the two iconic Cypriot poets Vassilis Michaelides and Dimitris Lippertis.

He has presented his works in Cyprus and abroad (Greece, Germany, Spain, Serbia, Istanbul, Belgium, Luxemburg, Sweden, Ireland, Romania, England, Russia, Australia, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Serbia, etc.), usually representing the Cypriot musical and poetic tradition, with the support of the Republic of Cyprus.

From the age of eight, he started playing the mandolin. He studied guitar, harmony and counterpoint at the "Greek Conservatory" in Larnaca, continuing on classical guitar with Stefanos Zymboulakis.

1993-1998: Studies in musicology at the Department of Music Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, specializing in the anthropology of music, ethnomusicology and Cypriot traditional music (unfinished postgraduate thesis).

In Athens, she attended composition and orchestration with Theodore Antoniou for a short period of time, partial classical guitar lessons with Kostas Grigorea and classical singing with Dina Goudioti. In Cyprus she studied vocal performance with Eleni Kanthou.

As an educator, since 2003 he has been a music teacher in the Cyprus Secondary Education. He also taught music at the Drama School "Vladimiros Kafkaridis" (from 2001 to 2006) and at the Nicosia Music Lyceum in 2006. She has been a lecturer in her educational seminars and music workshops and has led a variety of musical performances.

From 2009-2011 he voluntarily directed the choir of pensioners "The Old Company" of the Cyprus Pensioners' Union (Union of Cypriot Pensioners).

In his personal life, he raises a son, Arion, with the singer Atys (Hatice Ardost), with whom he was awarded the Stelios Stelios Haji-Ioannou Bicommunal Awards in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

As a performer, he presents himself as a musical narrator (storyteller), performing songs in his own music or arrangements, in the Cypriot idiom and in other languages.

In Greece, as a student, he created the "Youth band of Cypriot Music", presenting his first compositions and arrangements in Cypriot idiomatic verse.

After his student years, he founded in Cyprus the cultural production "Songs of the World" which was active from 2003-2005, where musicians of different origins (rebetiko, jazz, flamenco, tango, traditional music) merged their sounds into world songs in different languages.

In 2005, he founded the cultural production "Kyprogenia", with a new vision of Cypriot music (Cyprus World Fusion, with elements of Cypriot traditional music, western classical music, jazz and rock). He collaborated with outstanding Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot and Maronite musicians and singers and with the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra (Orchestral Suite "Kyprogenia"). In 2023 a new cycle of performances will begin, with the creation of a new band. The project has become known for its performances in Cyprus, but also abroad where it has represented Cyprus with the support of the Cyprus Republic (Serbia, Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg, Ireland).

He set to music much of the poetry of the legendary Greek Cypriot poet Vassilis Michaelides, in the Cypriot dialect and in Cypriot dialect/demotic. The work was published under the title "The first kingdom here was built by the gods" in the form of a CD and a book (1st edition 2011 and 2nd edition 2012). It is a multi-faceted work with performers : Christos Thivaios, Alkinoos Ioannidis, Yannis Kotsiras, Vassilis Lekkas, Manolis Mitsias, Vassilis Papakonstantinou, Kostas Hatzis, Petros Gaitanos, Kyriakou Pelagia, Christos Sikkis, Michalis Terlikkas, Byzantine choir "Romanos the Melodist", Alkistis Pavlidou, Kostas Charalambidis and others. The work was presented in the form of multi-musical performances and in more than 30 music and philological presentations of the CD-book in Cyprus and abroad.

In 2021, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution of 1821, Larkos Larkou presented his compositions as a music-theatre-cinematic performance, with his settings of the complete poems of Vassilis Michaelides "The 9th of July 1821 in Nicosia (Cyprus)" and "The Chiotissa in Limassol in 1821". entitled 1821 in Cyprus - "The song of Tzyprianos and the kioulsapa".

Since 2009, he has set to music 64 poems from Dimitris Lipertis' "Tzypriotika traoudkia" (cypriot songs). Some of them were presented for the first time in concerts in 2018.

His western classical works include the fantasy for orchestra "Travel!", arranged for two guitars, the wind quintet "Waiting for the green" and the "Kyprogenia" Suite for Symphony Orchestra and laouto (arrangements of four traditional Cypriot dances).

In the theatre he has composed music for more than 30 professional theatre productions of the Cyprus Theatre Organisation (THOC), Satirical Theatre, Skala Theatre, ETHAL and others, in collaboration with directors such as Evis Gavriilides, Nikos Charalambous, Monica Vassiliou, Yaşar Ersoy, Varnavas Kyriazis, Giorgos Mouaimis and others.

Notable plays for which he composed the music are "The Vagina Monologues" by Eve Ensler, "A strange afternoon" by Antonis Doriadis , "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams, "Vassilis Michaelides" by Makis Antonopoulos, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by William Shakespeare, "Look Back in Anger" by John Osborne, "Frogs" by Aristophanes, "The King's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen, "Rostbeef" by Leia Vitali, "Peace" by Aristophanes, "Hamlet II" by Sam Bobrick, "Lionheart in Cyprus" by Andros Pavlidis, "Widows" by Ariel Dorfman and "Lysistrata" by Aristophanes.

From 2003-2008 he was involved in dance theatre and "Movement and Body Awareness" and collaborated with "Echo Arts Living Arts Center", founded by Arianna Economou, as a composer and/or performer, with movement and musical improvisation. He participated in productions such as: "Rooms full of clouds", "One square foot", "If Not For You", "Bridge" and in his solo performance "8 From the Sky", with movement lined with a montage his theatrical music and eight songs.