Nikos Karvelas has filed an injunction to stop Anna Vissi performing his songs, taking a public row over the OAKA concert into court.
The composer said earlier, in a reply to Vissi carried by Mega, that he knew the Olympic Stadium show was happening but was not proud of it. “You may have plenty of financial resources. The musical ones, I am very much afraid, you will have to start looking for from zero,” he told Vissi and her team.
What Karvelas says
He rejected the claim that he had been informed and was proud of the production. He said the whole country knew the date. Pride, he said, was another matter. He accused Vissi and Dimitra Mermigka-Kousta of keeping him out of any creative or advisory role so the show would stay as they had planned it.
“This is not the Anna I knew, loved and admired,” he said. He argued that her statement confirmed a standing deal for a fee on top of the royalties he collects through the collective management organisation, and that she knew about, and approved, a last-minute change to his seats and a threat to bar him if he tried to sit in the original ones.
He called the claim that he demanded €1.5 million “a crude lie.” He said he asked for the same fee as under their Kallimarmaro agreement, plus whatever the collecting society owed him. The reply, he said, was half or nothing, and the half only if he never spoke against her. He refused, saying he would not trade his opinion for money.
He also denied taking money from Mr Koustas, and mocked the suggestion of a €500,000 “favour” or loan. “I never received money from Mr Koustas,” he said. He added that while they worked together they had supported each other, and that this was not charity. “Once there was no Vissi without Karvelas, and the reverse. What I owe her, she owes me.”
The substance, he said, is the songs and the performance, not the money. He said the exchange with the crowd at the Olympic Stadium was not the same as her other shows.
Vissi’s lawyer
Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, Vissi’s lawyer, told SKAI that Karvelas cannot legally bar her from the songs. The economic rights, he said, have been assigned to the collecting society. The moral right stays with the composer, but a ban would require a court to find that Vissi distorts the work. She has sung them for more than 35 years, he said, and the chance of a ban succeeding is small.
He repeated that Karvelas asked for €1.5 million days before the OAKA concert, that Vissi had lent him more than €500,000, and that production had already paid €350,000 in royalties.
