Georges Aperghis

After Die Hamletmaschine-oratorio released by Cypres in 2002, Ictus returns with a new recording of a big piece by Georges Aperghis, Avis de Tempête, first performed at the Lille Opera in November 2004, and revived in June 2005 for the opening of IRCAM’s celebrated Agora festival in Paris.

Born in Athens in 1945, Aperghis settled in France in 1963. From the 1970s he developed a highly personal style of composition, on the fringes of mainstream currents in contemporary music. He turned towards a theatricality of sound, with a dynamic approach to both text and music, using video at a very early stage as well as technological innovation, and in this way he produced works that filled a gap between theatre, opera and music.

Before composing a single note of Avis de Tempête (Storm warning), Aperghis had given all his collaborators the watchword to create an “opera that IS a storm”. The librettist Peter Szendy constructed a ‘whale-text’, i.e. an uninterrupted flow of text fragments, words, loops, repetitions, syllables gleaned from the works of Kafka, Baudelaire, Hugo and Shakespeare, and structured around two stories by Herman Melville, The Lightning-Rod Man and the famous Moby Dick. With Aperghis, however, the text is not set to music, it IS the music; the words are there to intensify the musical intoxication and they sometimes lose their meaning to the point of becoming mere sounds. The singers and reciters accomplish a veritable feat of prowess, surrounded not only by ten fabulous instrumentalists, but also by a world of fascinating electronic effects that “are there to destabilise the ensemble but also to sweep it away as a real storm would”. This aural hurricane is backed up by some spectacular studio work on sound. Be careful, the SACD multichannel version might well blow you away!

The result: music that is profuse, vigorous, organic. Avis de Tempête is an opera that does not tell a story with events and characters: it is a mechanism for creating an inner storm, with its devastating gusts of wind and its depressions, an incredible storm in a skull. Ictus is the ideal musical crew for staying in command of this storm, described by the press as “a total art work”.

Georges Aperghis, a French of Greek origin, is one of today's most exciting composers, and it is a truism to say his universe is closely linked to the theatral world. After Freud, Levi-Strauss, Diderot and Kafak a.o., he meets Heiner Müller, and more exactly this Hamletmaschine which results from the great writer's obsession for the shakespearian character. Premiered by Ictus on 30th of September 2000 at Festival Musica in Strasbourg, which commissioned the work, Die Hamletmaschine-Oratorio travels since then across Europe with much echo. Indeed, Aperghis' musical theatre finds his path in contact with the text of Müller, which he treats with definitely personal eyes and spirit. "What I wish to show with this oratorio is a precise image which splits herfself, continually interrupted by musical telegrams" (Georges Aperghis). A myth comes undone; a great work is in process of being built; Ictus is present, at the right moment and right place. Once more.