BBC Music Magazine review for Jupiter's Dance.

Jupiter's Dance DVD review from BBC Music Magazine June 2007

Jupiter's Dance is a documentary about home-grown music making in Kinshasa, centered on the singer Jupiter Bokondji and touring locations around the sprawling city. It presents a portrait of a population that can't stop making music whatever the odds, on can and wire instruments and on table top drums if they can't afford the local guitar maker. There are soloists and bands galore. Jupiter's own band gets the accomaniying CD, a straightforward and fresh affair, featuring his urgent, breathy, vocals with their strikings stylised vibrato; there's enough variety about the rhythmns to sustain interest.

Aperghis/Juxtapositions DVD review from International Record Review, December 2006.

It's a cause for real regret that the prodigious Georges Aperghis remains little known outside France as a composer, especially among those seriously concerned about the future of "classical music". Born in Athens but based in France since 1963, the 60-year-old Aperghis writes music of Modernist, even his expermintations have affinities to the likes of Cage, Kagel and Berio, but its repertoire of sounds, gestures and images is one the less profoundly original. Importantly he has developed a following among younger audiences, and has done so without compromising the integrity or the "difficulty" of his own idiom. One must hope that this exceptionally fine DVD, the ninth in the series from Juxtapositions, each of which is devoted to the music of a major modern composer, will help bring Aperghis's remarkable music to much wider attention.

The disc offers two stunning films, both completed this year. Catherine Maximoff's Storm Beneath A Skull is an hour long documentary, with substantial filmed excerpts from several pieces written by Aperghis between 1979 and 2004. Interleaved with the music are intelligent, funny, highly informative interviews with the composer and most of the featured performers , all of them young, articulate and good-looking. And, evidently, in excellent shape : one of the signal feature in Aperghis's music, after all, is it's sheer physicality. Nearly impossible to categorize, these scores transgress familiar boudaries, challenged established orders, put in question the safe distinctions between genres. They put on show new ways of thinking, saying, being and doing, and thus suggest new ways of making sense. They blur the difference between acting and singing, the actual and the mimeting the real and the virtual. Aperghis explains the he composes for particular performers, who are also people who interest him; he builds his compositions around his perceptions of tem, but in ways that finally ask them to exceed themselves. His performers are stunningly virtuosic : the music sets obstacles for them with what he calls an enigma. In a somewhat Cage-like manner, he hopes his music will make the world 'habitable' - Which evolves accepting 'the notion of loss' (of logic of construction). Since he sees no coherence except that which we supply through our individual lives, he puts his trust only in fragments, not in wholes. These are important keys.

Visually the film captures the drama of the performance moment with an intensity that is truly riveting. Baritone Lionel Peintre performs an astonishing solo vocal piece (Quatorze Jactations), more spoken than sung. He also talks about the strangeness of this score : how it overwhelmed him at first, and how he has come to think of it as a wild animal out to get him. Récitations his also a solo; in soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac's gripping performance, it comes over rather as a series of obscure but mysteriously familiar conversations, it realms regions and topics only hinted at, never defined. The fabulous Zig Bong is a jazzy piece for unaccompanied speaking vocal quartet; it includes a duo whose vocals and physical gestures belong to an intense and vital dialogue, as strange as it is recognizable. In Le Corps à Corps, the remarkable François Rivalland sings, speaks and plays the zarb (a Persian Goblet drum) compelling us to wonder : is this anger ? or fear ? Why does she suddenly stop, look over her shoulder, seem alarmed, hold her breath - then explode again ?Alter Face is utterly different : a lovely set of whispered, murmured interactions between two sonically enmeshed pianos. The excerpts from Apergis's recent opera Avis De Tempête offer glipses of what a full, live performance must be like, with dancing, acting, singing, acoustic and electronic instruments, and a stage surrounded by giant video screens.

Little Red Riding Hood is a 43 minute film by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu, based on an eighteenth century printed source (without the hunter or the happy ending). The minimal set is visually clean, simple, dramatic. Against a mirror-like black floor and unlit black background, subtle lightning picks out characters and instruments; the only prop is a centre-stage upright piano with front panels removed, its metal innards gliting somewhat ominously.

The six young musicians of the ensemble Reflex display a quite extraordinary range of skills. In addition to playing instruments , the also act, sing, speak, mime, whistle, tap-dance, gesture, chant, declaim, do clown-like comic routines, narrate, provide sound effets...and perform these various roles in solos, duos and larger combinations. AZttired in red, black and white, they also often wear scarily realistic wolf masks. Instruments are also characters, or part of characters. Apart from the piano, they're always on the move - mobile sonic sources whose constantly surprising utterances are at once music and sound effect. Their human blowers and scrapers dart, dance seneak or slide around the stage, participating visually and sonically in the action, often startling ways. In one scene, the tuba lies unattended on the foor, then growls; but when one of the musicians-actors snuggles up and gently strokes it, the growls turn to wolfish sounds of pleasure. (Unseen, it's player is behind the piano, controlling the instrument through a length of flexible piping).

Genre defeating, the work sits shiftingly somewhere between steet theatre, circus, opera, performance art and puppet showx. As if to stay true to that purpose, Mathieu's film presents itself both as, and as other than, a filmic record of Aperghis's piece. Over a spoken commentary in English, it introduces itself as a kind of documentary for children on the history of the Little Red Riding Hood. , complete with a some historic illustrations. But soon the commentator deftly leads us to Aperghis and his version of the tale, and how he did what he did : Which is the version we then find ourselves watching. And like verything else on this disc, it's much, much too good to miss.

Christopher Ballantine.