Still Life at the Penguin Cafe - Piano

Ballet 1988, by David Bintley

Music by Simon Jeffes

Arranged for Piano by Henry Roche

David Bintley's innovative ballet ''Still Life' at the Penguin Cafe' received its premiere at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1988 and since then has been a worldwide dance sensation. Succeeding performances and recent revivals in the UK, Europe, and Australia have met with enthusiastic responses from both audiences and critics alike. Simon Jeffes was a musical adventurer who crossed boundaries with a sense of fun. He started as a classically-trained guitarist and avante-garde composer, but through his Penguin Cafe Orchestra went on to develop an engaging musical Esperanto that made his work almost impossible to categorize, working with everyone from the Sex Pistols to the Royal Ballet. -- from The Times, 1997: 'What sort of music is it?' Simon Jeffes: 'Ideally, I suppose it's the sort of music you want to hear, music that will lift your spirit. It's the sort of music played by imagined, wild, free, mountain prople creating sounds of a subtle, dreamlike quality.' -- Simon Jeffes was born in Sussex, England, on February 19th, 1949. He died on the afternoon of December 11th, 1997.