CHRISTOS MAKRIDIS culture
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Radio Days Is Live

Radio Days, the new six-track release from Soula Parassidis and Norman Reinhardt, is out now on all major platforms.

Drawing on the glamour, romance, and theatricality of early American popular music, the album brings together “O Holy Night,” “O Lola,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

Produced by Grammy-nominated artist Jeff Trott, with arrangements and piano by Academy Award-winning arranger Patrick Warren, Radio Days places two classically trained voices inside a sound world shaped by radio, cinema, and the great popular songs of the twentieth century.

The project takes inspiration from an era when radio transformed singers into household names and individual songs into shared cultural moments. Rather than reproduce that period, the recording draws on its elegance, scale, and emotional immediacy while giving the repertoire a contemporary cinematic character.

Released through Living Opera Music and distributed by Universal Music Group, Radio Days is available now on all major streaming platforms.

Listen to Radio Days

CM Culture artist Soula Parassidis has been featured in Marie Claire Greece and The Huffington Post USA following her response to recent comments by Timothée Chalamet about opera and ballet.

In the articles, Parassidis, a Greek Canadian soprano and Artistic Director of Living Opera Music, pushes back against the familiar claim that opera is no longer relevant. Rather than treating the debate as a celebrity news cycle moment, she uses it to make a broader point about the enduring value of live performance, especially at a time when artificial intelligence is transforming much of the cultural economy.

Her comments emphasize that opera is not disappearing, even if traditional funding models are under pressure in parts of Europe. She also points to signs of renewal, including younger audiences engaging with the art form. As she notes, Opera America data show that more than half of first time opera attendees are under 45.

Parassidis also addresses the growing conversation around AI and the arts. Her argument is that opera and ballet remain fundamentally tied to physical presence, breath, discipline, and risk in real time, qualities that cannot be easily replicated by synthetic media. In that sense, the very qualities that make these forms seem outside the pace of pop culture may also be what make them durable.

For CM Culture, the Marie Claire Greece feature marks an important example of Soula bringing an artist’s voice into a wider cultural conversation about technology, relevance, and the future of live art.

You can read the Marie Claire op-ed here and the The Huffington Post feature here.

Living Opera Releases “O Lola” from Radio Days: The Golden Age of American Song

CM Culture is pleased to share the release of "O Lola", the latest track from Radio Days: The Golden Age of American Song, the new album project from Living Opera, distributed by Universal Music Group.

Performed by tenor Norman Reinhardt, “O Lola ch’ai di latti la cammisa” from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana brings one of opera’s most haunting melodies into the broader musical and historical world of Radio Days. Produced by Grammy nominated songwriter Jeff Trott (If it makes you happy, Soak up the sun), and arranged by Academy Award winning arranger Patrick Warren, the recording reflects the project’s larger aim of connecting the operatic voice to the history of broadcast, recording, and American cultural memory.

The release also speaks to Living Opera’s wider artistic vision: presenting classical repertoire in ways that feel vivid, accessible, and culturally connected without losing musical depth. In the context of Radio Days, “O Lola” is not simply an isolated operatic excerpt. It becomes part of a larger story about how voices travel across media, from the early days of transmission to today’s digital platforms.

The project is led by soprano Soula Parassidis and Norman Reinhardt, founders of Living Opera Music, whose work continues to bridge performance, storytelling, and contemporary cultural strategy. Through releases like “O Lola,” Living Opera is building a model that treats classical music not as a closed tradition, but as a living form that can move across audiences, formats, and generations.

With Radio Days, that approach is especially clear: the project draws on the sound world of the past while presenting it with a distinctly modern framework for recording, distribution, and audience engagement. “O Lola” is a strong example of that balance, rooted in operatic tradition but shaped for a broader cultural conversation.