PANAGIOTIS MARGARIS

A trumpet in Moscow, a guitar in Athens

Margaris's route to the classical guitar did not start with a guitar. He dates his beginning to 1984 and credits a trumpet player he heard on a family trip to Moscow with the decision to learn an instrument at all. What he settled on was the six-string classical, and he has not moved off it since. He was born in Athens and studied classical guitar there alongside advanced theory, and he still teaches in the city.

He played his first concerts in 1990, but puts the start of his working life in 1995, when his own teacher, the composer and guitarist Notis Mavroudis, took him on as a duo partner. That pairing ran for fifteen years and set the shape of nearly everything he has done since: two or three players rather than an ensemble, and arrangements built so that one instrument carries the harmony as well as the melody. In June 2000 he was awarded his classical guitar diploma with top marks and a first prize for performance.

Six strings instead of an orchestra

He is unsentimental about why the instrument holds him. Classical guitar, he has said, has enormous capacity as a polyphonic instrument, and the problem that still interests him is standing in for an entire orchestra on his own. He has also argued for small line-ups as a matter of principle, on the grounds that fewer players on stage produce more artistic force and more truth than a crowded one — which explains why a career of roughly 1,700 concerts, across Greece, Europe, America and Africa, has mostly been played by two or three people.

The teaching runs in parallel rather than as a sideline. He screens applicants for long-term commitment instead of taking whoever arrives, and a number of working Greek guitarists have come out of his class. He has described improvisation and experimentation as positions he has always held, which is a slightly awkward thing for a conservatory-trained classical player to say and goes some way to explaining the records.

Fifteen albums, then a number one

The discography is large and deliberately promiscuous about genre. The "Cafe de l'Art" sequence of guitar-duet themes, whose first volume appeared in 2007, won him Arion awards in 2005 and 2006 for orchestral album. "Duende" followed in 2011 and "Rock of My Soul" in 2012, the latter being the record that made his name outside classical circles: rock material rewritten for classical guitar, which in Greece in 2012 was not a crowded field. "Me ti Magia tis Kitharas" came in 2014, and 2017 brought two albums, "Taxidia Psichis" and a set of Mikis Theodorakis interpretations.

"Preloudio ston Erota" arrived in 2020 after a three-year gap, released through MLK and Nuevo Productions, mixing his own compositions with arrangements of international repertoire and bringing in Doros Dimosthenous for a reading of Black's "Wonderful Life". It reached number one for sales in Greece — an outcome no Greek classical guitarist had managed before. His biography puts him at fifteen albums at that point and sixteen since, most of them having reached the official Greek IFPI top ten, with claimed worldwide sales above a million copies. In July 2017 UNESCO honoured him for his contribution to culture.

Since 2025 the output has shifted to singles rather than albums: "Trip to Buenos Aires", "Requiem for a Dream" and "Gnossienne No. 1" in 2025, then an instrumental "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and, on 16 October 2026, "Etude No. 5".

The company he keeps

The collaboration list is long and includes Theodorakis, Al Di Meola and Stamatis Kraounakis. The ones that have shaped his stage work, though, are the singer partnerships. He toured with Eleni Vitali and recorded an album with her. The more durable one is with Christos Thivaios, whom he first met in 1997 while recording "Poso poli s'agapisa", a song Thivaios still sings with Margaris behind him on guitar.

That pairing became a touring programme in its own right, billed as "2" for two guitars and one voice, which opened on Friday 1 December 2023 at the Sfinx venue in central Athens for a second season of limited dates. The format was Thivaios's repertoire plus improvised versions of songs the two refused to announce in advance, and Margaris said at the time that new recorded work with Thivaios was in preparation. He has also kept a thread of larger retrospective concerts going — an anniversary programme, "25 Years with the Magic of the Guitar", played Stathmos in Athens on 15 November 2022.

"Mesogeios": the work of 2026

The current project is "Mesogeios", a Mediterranean programme performed with the singer Katerina Ververi. It is built from Portuguese fado and songs of southern Italy set against material by Lucio Dalla, Jacques Brel, Nino Rota and Theodorakis, interleaved with solo guitar arrangements and original pieces drawn from his own records.

It opened in Athens on Sunday 1 March 2026 at 20:30 in the Giannis Marinos Hall at the Athens Concert Hall, presented with the Friends of Music Society, with tickets at €25 and production by Guitar Galaxy Productions, and was announced then as touring Greece and abroad across the year. It did: the Pantheon Theatre in Patras on Saturday 4 April 2026, and the open-air Rena Vlachopoulou theatre in the Mon Repos park on Corfu on Wednesday 15 July 2026, both at 21:00, both priced at €20 in advance, €25 on the door and €15 concession, and both billed at 100 minutes.

Where he stands now

As of late October 2026 the touring version has been folded into a residency. "Mesogeios" moved into the Theatre of the NO on Konstantinou Palaiologou 3 in central Athens on Sunday 1 November 2026 at 20:30, and is scheduled to play Sundays for a limited run, with presale through Ticketmaster's Greek site at €20 face value, listed elsewhere at €21.20 with fees. The singer Fotini Velesiotou guested on the opening night, and the production has said further performers from his back catalogue of collaborations will appear unannounced at selected shows. The run was announced across the Greek press on 22 October 2026.

He appeared on the television programme "Katheres Kouvedes" on 28 October 2026 to talk about the show and the route that led to it, where he set out his aim plainly: to stay creative for as long as he is alive. That is close to the only thing he says about the future. A new album is not currently announced; the singles keep arriving, the Sunday slot is booked, and the plan appears to be to keep the Mediterranean programme moving.