Christodoulos Halaris - Tropicos tis Parthenou (1973)

I certainly don't mean to take anything away from other greek artists I so greatly admire, some of whom, like Nikos Xilouris, were vital contributors to Christodoulos Halaris' first records (which felt simultaneously the product of a musical community and of a singular artistic mind); but when I hear any of those 1970's albums, the infinitely vast and detailed tapestries of sound he weaved around the warp of melodies that may very well have been passed on by Odysseus after hearing them from the sirens (as I would happily crash my ship into some rocks just to follow their uber-beckoning call (not being a sailor, I just go around parroting them phonetically instead, with no idea of what I might be missaying)), drawing on his scholarly knowledge of antique music while not being held back by any scholarly adherence to strict musical prescriptions (that would come later), and orchestrating into a shining whole a constellation of arcane instruments and of instrumentalists who were surely having their way with the muses, the only way my mind can process all that insurmountable brilliance, elevating greek folk music to a whole new plane of aesthetic existence, is by paraphrasing one of those lapidary Godard sentences, that managed to be simultaneously hyperbolic, given the big picture they willfully dismiss, and perfectly just, considering the transcendental exceptionality of what's in front of you. Et la musique grecque, c'est Christodoulos Halaris. Simple as that.

Elena Papandreou - Guitar Recital (1998)

It is more complicated than that (not to get into a whole discussion on the validity of the establishment of aesthetic canons, which is an inevitability in any social world; it's more a matter of how they get established, and by whom), but one of the mind-numbing proclivities of the classical musical world is clearly the rigidity of the repertoire musicians are supposed to devote themselves to, to prove their stuff and to please the more stuffy concert-going crowd, who tend to like their music as they like their furs: moth-balled. 
One of the hopes of accelerating the glacial pace at which that repertoire is renewed is precisely when artists and composers not at the center of that world tap into their distinctive local resources, and that is exactly what Papandreou expertly did in this recital, with exciting pieces by Nikos Mamangakis, Mikis Theodorakis, and fellow guitarist Vangelis Boudonis (first I've heard of him, and I would gladly hear some more), that make it one of the best in this long series of guitar records released by Naxos. But hey, by all means, you guys keep on playing your transcriptions of always the same Bach lute suites (not the best example, J. S. 4ever, but you catch my drift); I'm not yawning.