Immediately recognizable in Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis’s works are moments of startling, absurd and often witty theater. In his famous “Récitations” for solo female voice, sensual incantations expand and contract, pyramid-like, on the page and in time; “Les guetteurs de sons” (for three percussionists) delights in the play of sound, movement, and expectation created by the rising and falling of an arm above a drum. But Aperghis, 78, is a master of timbre, color, and shape even when his works include no explicitly composed theatrical elements. Take the blend between solo instrument and strings at the end of his “Concert pour accordéon”; the “Fuzzy Trio,” in which fragments of tonal material are stripped of context, like Classical artworks stolen from a museum and placed in an thief’s attic; or the bracing, acidic timbral mixture of spoken and sung language in the “Wölfli-Kantata.” Aperghis’s music is new music with lowercase letters. It’s rare to find a composer so prolific and yet so immune to the clichés of contemporary composition.
Aperghis’s latest work, a music-theater piece titled “Die Erdfabrik” (“The Earth Factory”), runs from August 11 to August 20 at the Ruhrtriennale Festival in western Germany, with the performances taking place in Duisburg. Using texts by the contemporary French author Jean-Christophe Bailly and the German Romantic poet (and occasional composer) Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, the piece aims to explore the geological processes behind coal formation, processes humans learned to harness and which now threaten our existence on this planet. I spoke with Aperghis before rehearsal in Duisburg in a mixture of French and English.
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