Eleni Vitali (real name: Eleni Lavida) (Athens, September 13, 1954) is a Greek singer and performer of folk, folk and folk music. She is one of the most famous singers in the area.
She was born into a musical family and grew up traveling around the country as a child. Her family is of Roma origin. Takis (Dimitris) Lavida’s father played the santouri and Lousi (Hariklia) Karageorgiou’s mother was a singer at festivals. Thus, from a young age she enters the area of festivals, in the company of gypsy musicians and municipal instrumentalists. A remarkable fact is that already from the beginning of the 1950s the bouzouki had begun to succeed the santouri.
The consequence of this is the diverse musical personality she had when she decided to take part in the Thessaloniki song festival (with the song Without a penny) and to enter the field of discography. She made her first recording appearance in 1973, alongside Sotiria Bellou (“There is no more patience” by A. Kounadis-V. Goufa), and with “My carnation” as a defining element in her identity (and the parallel participation in the Festival with “Manolios”) becomes immediately known. With its beginning, Vitali manifests the basic characteristic, which will determine, from the beginning, its course: the coexistence within it of two worlds, complementary but often contradictory. The long range and timbre of her voice are characteristic.
At the beginning of the 1980s, she became active in popular singing, collaborating with the best of the genre (Christos Nikolopoulos, T. Soukas, etc.). At the same time, she participates in the works of artistic composers (Mikis Theodorakis, Stamatis Spanoudakis, Notis Mavroudis, Spyros Samoilis, Dionysis Savvopoulos, George Andreou, Antonis Mitzelos, Stamatis Kraunakis, George Stavrianos, Nikos Portokaloglou, etc.) and records re-performances of rebetikos, old folk and folk songs .
In 1989 she recorded “Opposite Balcony” and in 1993 “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in her own lyrics and music entering a period of maturity, which in 2000 with the album “Proskenio” is recapitulated.
She has made many appearances throughout Greece and Cyprus, while since the first years of her career she has been doing concerts abroad singing about diasporic Hellenism. In 1975 she married the musician Vangelis Xydis and in 1976 she gave birth to their son Nikos Xydis, a well-known songwriter and producer of Greek music and discography.
