Editor's note: Yanni will perform in concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 28, in Symphony Hall. Tickets are available at the usual outlets.On stage and off, Yanni goes for the big emotion.
"I want excitement, I want to chase things, I want the danger," the Greek-born composer, outfitted in mocha silk pants, shirt and jacket, says backstage at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Darkly handsome, with soulful brown eyes, a thick mustache and black hair that falls past his shoulders in perfect waves, his looks are as dramatic as he is.Yanni's aptly named sixth album, "Reflections of Passion," with its soaring instrumentals chosen by actress Linda Evans, topped Billboard's new-age chart for eight months. It has sold nearly 1 million copies - 300,000 of them in the week after the lovers' November appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
People around Yanni, 36, use words like "deep," "complicated" and "profound" to describe him. Backstage, toting a tome on holography, Evans, 48, confides that she and Yanni often discuss the nature of existence, sometimes speaking on the phone for six or seven hours.
"Am I sensitive? Yes," responds the affable composer, whose "Reflections of Passion" video shows a soft-focus Yanni seated before a flickering fire, Yanni running along the beach with a lissome dancer, Yanni passionately playing the piano, his hair wet and streaming down his back.
His music, he says, describes archetypal emotions. It needs no words. "Some of us are in touch with those emotions and allow them to exist."
Born Yanni Chryssomallis in Kalamata, Greece, he speaks of an idyllic childhood. "I have been loved unconditionally by my mother and father," he says.
He reveres his father, now 70, a banker who studied philosophy and yoga and who speaks five languages. He remembers his mother singing to him in a beautiful voice. "She has perfect pitch, like I do."
Yanni, now a U.S. citizen, came to the country to study psychology at the University of Minnesota and was on his way to a master's degree when he decided to make music his life. He played in a popular Minneapolis hard-rock band, Chameleon, before going out on his own.
Silence is what this self-taught musician needs in order to create. "You're making something that never existed before," he says. "You have to get rid of the garbage of life. Not really the garbage," he says, catching himself. "Worrying about needing gas in the car, buying that birthday gift, making those calls."
He bristles at the term "new age." "That's not what I do. That implies that the music is . . . just background. I intend to stir people up."