The new release with works by Georges Aperghis invites you on a musical journey into the intermediate world of sound, language and movement. With Tingel Tangel, Merry go round, Sur le fil and Ligne de fissure, the French-Greek composer once again demonstrates his masterful talent for playing with identity, emotion and abstraction. A music unfolds between dance-like motorisation, mechanical disruption and poetic fragility that challenges both physically and intellectually.

At the centre is the accordion and – less frequently in Aperghis's work – the cimbalom. Both instruments create a connection to imaginary folkloristic soundscapes that are reminiscent of Bartók, without being specifically localised. ‘I wanted the music to sound folkloric without you knowing which country it comes from,’ says Aperghis about Tingel Tangel, a series of whimsical miniatures with a theatrical undertone - a homage to Schumann, circus figures and cabaret abysses.

Soprano Angèle Chemin, accordionist Vincent Lhermet and cimbalom player Françoise Rivall give the music a lively multidimensionality through their highly precise and expressive playing. They are not only interpreters, but also co-creators of these ‘fragile dramaturgies’, in which every sound, every gesture is part of an intense interaction.

Whether in the reduced, tense chromaticism of Ligne de fissure or in the fragile, virtuoso Sur le fil – the ‘human being’ always remains at the centre. Aperghis's music is a balancing act between freedom and structure, between risk and poetry, full of humour, abysses and a longing for expression.

A portrait in sound – musical, human, uncompromisingly unique.

Georges Aperghis was born in Athens in 1945. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1963. His work is notable for its questioning of languages and the meaning. His compositions, whether instrumental, vocal or for stage, explore the borders of the intelligible. Aperghis’s music is not strictly linked to any dominant musical aesthetics of the contemporary musical creation but follows on his century by a dialogue with other forms of art – theatre and literature, humanities and social arts as well as visual arts. His art can be characterised by an extreme open-mindedness to the other. This otherness is combined with innovation when he includes electronics, video, machines, automatons or robots in his performances.