Stella Haskil was the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish-Greek family, who discovered her voice early in Thessaloniki and was encouraged to move Athens and pursue a career in the late 1930s by Rosa Eskenazi.
During the occupation of Greece, Haskil escaped the notice of the Nazis by performing simply as Stella. She didn’t start recording until after the war — her first was in 1946.
She recorded more than 130 songs, working with composers such as Tsitsanis, Kaldaras and Chiotis. Haskil’s recording career spanned the late 1940s and early 1950s as music was changing from classic rebetiko to a more popular form (laiko) and she recorded many of the classics of that time, including Night Without a Moon and Bir-Allah.
She died tragically young — age 36 — of cancer in 1954. I’m Burning, I’m Burning was released in 1951. (It isn’t related to the song of the same time from the 1986 movie Rebetiko.)
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