A fierce row has broken out between Anna Vissi and Nikos Karvelas over the OAKA concert, after the composer said she had taken a direction he does not agree with. Vissi answered with a harsh statement of her own.
She says he was fully behind the OAKA vision, which he now calls a “pharaonic spectacle,” and that he never objected to the production or the ticket prices. Then, she says, she was told three days before the show that he had suddenly demanded €1.5 million, to be paid within 24 hours, or he would use every means to stop the concert.
When he saw he could not block it, she says, he turned on her. Through her sister Niki, and in front of witnesses, he threatened to slander her in the media and destroy her personally and artistically, so that she “would not dare to leave the house.”
She says she had been helping him for the last six months, while he was short of money, and that he can be shown to have received more than €500,000. A large part of that, she says, came from Yannis Koustas, on a promise of repayment. After that behaviour, she asks, how could the production keep him and his guests in their original seats?
What shocks her, she says, is that someone she had treated as a friend, collaborator and family chose the biggest night of her career to put her under a pressure only she knows how she got through. She credited the audience. On the “silencing” he mentioned, she said she asked only that he not slander her, and that she would not do the same.
“For me, perhaps the most painful thing of all is that I discovered that the person I thought I knew for so many years, I may never have met,” she said. She called it her last personal statement, and closed with: “We will go against him wherever he turns up.”
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