Affinities: strength and sensitivity. Technical perfection and expressive lyricism. Romanticism and avant-garde. Complementary pairs that are translated into fascinating interpretive greatness by the soprano Fani Antonelou and pianist Kerstin Merck and are captured on the album Affinities released in 2019 by VIS. Choosing wisely the affinities that link Greek folk singing and German Lind, the two internationally acclaimed artists of the younger generation anthologize lyrical and poetic images of a musical journey that unfolds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through the fascinating diversity of their selections, the friendships, family ties or teacher-student relationships of leading Greek and German composers who studied and created in the three great German-speaking musical centres of Vienna, Munich and Berlin are highlighted. The aesthetic influences, sometimes clear and sometimes allusive, appear either as common origins, such as the folk tradition in the works of Konstantinidis, Kalomimiris and Brahms, or as strong personal idioms, such as the atonal expressionism of Mitropoulos and Sainberg, lending delightful coherence to an imaginatively structured musical mosaic.