Georges Aperghis – Heart Blowing (2023)
for brass quintet

Ensemble Musikfabrik
Christine Chapman, horn
Marco Blaauw, trumpet
Lucy Humphris, trumpet
Stephen Menotti, trombone

Video/editing, Janet Sinica
Recording producer Stephan Schmidt

Heart Blowing is Georges Aperghis’ experimental exploration of a seemingly familiar ensemble: a classical brass quintet (two trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba), which he ‘probes’ for its potential to be something different. In keeping with the spirit of his workshop motto, he asks: How does the voice of this instrument sound in this very piece? Starting from an initially consonant, almost banal core of sound, ‘magnetic fields’ emerge that set harmony and polyphonic lines in motion. Thus, five individual voices grow into a single musical entity: colourful textures of sound that seem to undulate as if breathing from a shared breath. In this constant alternation between virtuoso unison passages and ‘speech samples’, intimate moments suddenly emerge – monologues, solos, duets, complicities – which take shape like musical characters and vanish just as unexpectedly.