I first encountered the music of Georges Aperghis at the Banff Centre, Canada when Pauline Vaillencourt sang several of his Recitations for solo female voice. Initially I was very puzzled as to what the music expressed exactly but our program leader was very excited and we soon began to work on many of Aperghis’ pieces for performance. These contained a startling range of vocal expression, a playful inventiveness of language and gesture, joyful kinetic energy and profound emotional depths through which we began to discover how his music holds such an incredible range of dramatic possibilities.
In subsequent years at Banff, I led and conducted productions of his larger pieces including the world premiere of de la Nature de la Gravité — which I later found out that Georges’ own company in Paris, ATEM, could not perform because it was too complex! Jean Pierre Drouet, percussionist and performing associate of Georges in Paris was also on hand as guide when we rehearsed and performed. In the meantime, I had seen ATEM perform his astonishing music-theatre piece H at the Huddersfield New Music Festival.
I was determined take all I had learned about Aperghis’ music and theatre back to London and so, the project Recitations and Conversations was born, taking some five years to bring to fruition.
It was not easy to find suitable performers for Georges’ music-theatre work as players, singers and actors all assume equal roles on stage. I persevered and found a wonderful colleague in director Annabel Arden whose theatre training in Paris, language and musical sensitivity and experience with the Complicite theatre company was the perfect mixture to realize Aperghis’ intentions. I also found musicians Chris Brannick, Matt Sharp, Lore Lixenberg, Ian Stuart, Patrizia Meier and ‘guest star’ actors Joz Houben and Simon McBurney, who could all bring the right daring, physicality and elan to bear in performance. Included in the programs were The Physiological Laugh, Recitations for cello, Il Gigante Golia, Recitations for female voice, Les Septs Crimes de l’Amour and the truly remarkable piece Fidélité which in my estimation is a masterpiece of psychological and musical depth, and as close to a Samuel Beckett play in music as is possible.
The series was sold-out and a critical success. Georges came to London to see the performances. We have met many times since and I have travelled to see his new pieces in Paris and Berlin. I have programmed and performed more of his music including another critical and sold-out success in London, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) also superbly directed by Annabel Arden. I still dream of bringing the funding and resources together to create an entirely new piece with Georges.
Georges explores the expressive worlds of the subconscious and transforms these hidden, complex and even sometimes unrecognized states of being and intention into music, sound, gesture and movement, making the dream-world tangible. These can be quite abstract yet simultaneously very real; ritualized but incredibly close to our lived experience and often very playful and humorous. He finds an astonishingly wide variety of vocal expression that goes far beyond singing and the usual sprechgesang and integrates this with the pitch and rhythm of music and mixtures of French, German, English, Latin, Italian and even invented words and sounds. Georges’ art is quite unique so an exact description is quite difficult but one understands the richness and expression when it is seen and heard.