ENSEMBLE MÊTIS
L’ŒIL ET L’OREILLE
Four contrasting works invite audiences to see sound as well as hear it, exploring the interplay of music, cinema, resonance, colour, movement and space.
PROGRAMME
Gérard Pesson
Études pour piano** (2026), 15 min
Zosha Di Castri
Sprung Testament** (2017), 13 min
For viiolin and piano
Edvin Ljubijankic
La Chute de la maison Usher* (2025), 5 min [Cine-concert]
For violine and piano
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Kontakte (1979), 33 min
For piano, percussion and tape
Performers
Solists of ensemble Mêtis
Stéphanos Thomopoulos: piano
Clarissa Severo De Borba: percussion
Violaine Darmon: piano
Total duration: 70 min
* World Premiere
** French Premiere
L’ŒIL ET L’OREILLE
Above all, the title of this concert describes a mode of attention. Some music engages the ear as other works engage the eye, conjuring colours, movements, layers, and spaces. When music meets cinema, this relationship between eye and ear becomes explicit. Elsewhere, it remains an invitation to perceive what changes, lingers, or lies hidden within sound.
The four works in this programme offer four very different experiences: exploring the piano’s resonances with Gérard Pesson; renewing the dialogue between violin and piano with Zosha Di Castri; bringing a new musical creation into dialogue with the images of Jean Epstein; and finally, with Karlheinz Stockhausen, entering a space in which electronic sounds and acoustic instruments form a single universe in motion.
WORKS
Études pour piano (2026), 15 min
One of the leading figures in contemporary French music, Gérard Pesson has developed an instantly recognisable compositional voice, shaped by memory, reworkings, quotations, and an extraordinary attention to the finest details of sound.
Commissioned by Ensemble Métis and dedicated to Stéphanos Thomopoulos, his six Études pour piano were premiered by their dedicatee at the Greek National Opera in Athens.
Like the great collections of études by Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, each piece addresses a particular aspect of pianistic technique and composition: Étude-bourdon, Pour les notes répétées, Pour les accords, Pour les graves, En nuage, and En ruban. Yet Pesson brings his own distinctive perspective to the genre: offbeat, filled with references and reminiscences, occasionally mischievous, and always deeply personal. Technical material is never an end in itself. Instead, it becomes the starting point for a playful exploration of the piano’s memory and our habitual ways of listening.
The sostenuto pedal—and with it, the instrument’s resonance—plays an essential role throughout the cycle. We are invited to listen closely to what remains after each attack: the overtones that intermingle, the colours that emerge and fade, and the almost imperceptible sonorities that arise between two events.
Gérard Pesson is often described as a composer of silence. It might be more accurate to say that he brings music to life within what we once believed to be silence: in the gaps, the lingering resonances, and the traces left behind by sounds. Between the notes, an entire world of subtle colours blossoms.
Sprung Testament (2017), 13 minin
For violin and piano
With Sprung Testament, Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri likewise places her work in dialogue with musical history. The piece was conceived as a companion to Beethoven’s “Spring” Sonata. Its title brings together the vitality of spring and the Heiligenstadt Testament, the letter in which Beethoven expressed his despair at his growing deafness, as well as his determination to overcome this ordeal and fulfil his artistic mission.
Sprung Testament takes the form of an unconventional three-movement sonata for violin and piano. The expansive first movement unfolds a wealth of material, rich in transformations and contrasts. The second opens into a slow, contemplative space before building towards a powerful dramatic climax—the culmination of the work as a whole. The much shorter third movement unleashes a playful, springing energy.
Working from meticulously notated instrumental writing, Di Castri expands the duo’s conventional possibilities. She employs several extended piano techniques and introduces two percussion instruments—the flexatone and the vibraslap—further enriching the work’s sonic palette.
The result is a score brimming with colour, impulse, and rhythm. Its physical energy, sharply defined accents, and lively exchanges between the two instruments can at times evoke the world of Bartókian dance.
Edvin Ljubijankic
La Chute de la maison Usher (2025), 5 min [Cine-concert]
For violine and piano
Selected to take part in the NIMAcademy 2026, young composer Edvin Ljubijankic developed this new score under the guidance of Peyman Yazdanian. This six-month international composition academy invites emerging artists to explore the relationship between contemporary music and the moving image, addressing questions of form, dramaturgy, synchronisation, and instrumental writing specific to live film performance.
Written for violin and piano, La Chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) accompanies an excerpt from Jean Epstein’s 1928 silent film. Its premiere marks the culmination of a creative process carried out in dialogue with Ljubijankic’s mentor and the performers of Ensemble Métis.
For his adaptation, Epstein drew not only on Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same name but also incorporated elements from The Oval Portrait, particularly the motif of an artist who, by painting a loved one, appears to transfer their life into the work of art.
Epstein conveys Poe’s fantastical atmosphere through distinctly cinematic means. Slow motion, superimpositions, mobile camerawork, editing, and deliberately unreal sets unsettle our familiar perception of time and space. The narrative thus takes the form of a mysterious and oppressive visual reverie.
Edvin Ljubijankic’s score places the violin and piano in dialogue with this world. It creates a new encounter between images made nearly a century ago and the immediate presence of the two musicians on stage: between the fixed time of film and the living time of performance.
Kontakte (1979), 33 min
For piano, percussion and tape
At the heart of the programme, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte stands as one of the major works of the post-war musical avant-garde. Composed between 1958 and 1960, it is a landmark work that profoundly reshaped conceptions of timbre, musical time, and sonic space.
In its version for electronic sounds, piano, and percussion, two instrumentalists perform live alongside a pre-composed and recorded electronic part. The title, meaning “Contacts”, refers first to the encounters forged between electronic sounds and acoustic instruments. Yet these contacts occur at every level: between pitch and rhythm, between the timbres of the piano and those of the percussion, between sustained sound and impulse, and between what is performed on stage and what is projected through the loudspeakers.
Performing the work presents a formidable challenge. The electronic part unfolds according to its own fixed timeline: it can neither wait nor adapt. The performers must therefore place their interventions within it with extreme precision while preserving the sense of a living, mobile, and spontaneous sonic material. The recorded part is neither an accompaniment nor a backdrop: it is a true partner, engaged in a continuous dialogue with the piano and percussion.
Stockhausen also explores the movement of sound through space. A sonic event may appear to travel around the listener, draw closer, recede, or suddenly change its nature. An electronic pitch turns into a pulse; a synthetic timbre seems to continue through a percussion instrument; a piano attack appears to emerge from the recorded part. The boundaries between the acoustic and the electronic gradually become uncertain.
Listening thus takes on an almost visual dimension: it follows trajectories, distinguishes layers, perceives volumes, and moves through an ever-changing sonic architecture.
From the hidden resonances of Pesson’s Études to the vast structure of Kontakte, The Eye and the Ear invites audiences to observe sound as much as listen to it—and to discover the colours, movements, and spaces that music can awaken within us.
BIOPGRAPHIES
Clarissa Severo De Borba — Percussion
Clarissa Severo de Borba began her percussion studies with Ney Rosauro at the Federal University of Santa Maria in Brazil. She later studied with Mark Ford and Christopher Deane at East Carolina University in the United States, where she earned a Master’s degree in Percussion.
In 2002, she received a Doctorate in Percussion from the University of Miami, where she also taught and directed the Percussion Ensemble. Alongside her performance studies, she took courses in composition and musical analysis, developing a particular interest in sonic research and extended techniques for percussion instruments.
Clarissa has participated in numerous premieres. In Brazil, she took part notably in the Mercosur contemporary music project, performing works by Frederico Richter, Lindembergue Cardoso, and Ney Rosauro. In the United States, she premiered works for solo percussion by John Van der Slice, Dennis Kam, and Christopher Deane. She has also performed extensively in Europe, appearing in Spain, France, and Belgium both as a soloist and with the duo The QuB.
Her work for vibraphone and sound processing, Floating Tones, was selected by the American label Hypnos Records as one of ten experimental music pieces featured on the album Echoes of Polyhymnia.
Deeply committed to contemporary classical music, Clarissa conducts extensive research into the role of percussion in new music, as well as the methods and techniques that allow these instruments to be used to their fullest potential within an ensemble.
Together with Olivier Benoit and Santiago Quintans, she created the free-improvisation, sound, and video project Anatomie d’Un Instant.
Clarissa Severo de Borba currently teaches percussion at the Cholet and Le Mans conservatoires and performs regularly with ensembles of varying instrumentation in France and abroad.
In October 2012, as a guest soloist with the Unisinos Orchestra of Porto Alegre and at the University of Rio de Janeiro, she premiered Santiago Quintans’s Concerto for Vibraphone and Strings.
Stéphanos Thomopoiulos – Piano
Throughout his career, Stéphanos Thomopoulos’s artistic choices and pursuits have made him a true experimenter at the piano. Alongside his deep attachment to the core repertoire and to favourite composers such as Beethoven, Ravel, and Liszt, he readily embraces any artistic venture capable of furthering his search for the new. Unusual repertoire, contemporary music, academic research, theatre, visual arts, educational projects, and historical instruments all form part of his practice. He is drawn to any encounter that can give rise to new and hybrid experiences.
After studying at the State Conservatory of Thessaloniki in Greece and the Cologne University of Music in Germany, Stéphanos Thomopoulos was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where he studied with Jacques Rouvier and Marie-Françoise Bucquet. He subsequently joined Håkon Austbø’s class at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and continued his training for two years with Aldo Ciccolini.
A prizewinner at international competitions and supported by the Blüthner, Yamaha, and Kempff foundations, Stéphanos Thomopoulos has performed at prestigious venues including the Philharmonie de Paris, IRCAM, Salle Gaveau, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Louvre in Paris; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Salle Garnier in Monaco; Alti Hall in Kyoto; the Megaron and Greek National Opera in Athens; and the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus. He is regularly invited to perform with the national orchestras of Belgrade, Odessa, and Cyprus, as well as the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, Cairo Opera Orchestra, Nice Opera Orchestra, and all the major Greek orchestras.
His musical partners include the Arditti Quartet, Patrice Fontanarosa, Loïc Schneider, Anne Queffélec, and Shani Diluka. He has also collaborated with and premiered works by composers including Gérard Pesson, Marc Monnet, Giorgos Koumendakis, Francesco Filidei, Tristan Murail, Jean-Luc Hervé, Alireza Farhang, Patrick Marcland, Marco Momi, and Alessio Silvestrin. He performs with the ensembles L’Itinéraire, Bloom, Kyklos, Inicia, and Métis.
Stéphanos Thomopoulos was the first pianist in France to complete a Doctorate in Performance at the CNSM de Paris, under the supervision of Gérard Pesson. This research led him to give concerts and participate in conferences devoted to Xenakis, as well as to contribute to the collective volume Performing Xenakis alongside figures such as Milan Kundera, Michel Tabachnik, and Irvine Arditti, published by Pendragon Press. He also wrote the preface to Éditions Salabert’s new edition of Iannis Xenakis’s works for piano.
Stéphanos Thomopoulos is Professor and Coordinator of the Piano Department at the Conservatoire de Nice. He is regularly invited to give masterclasses at the Printemps des Arts in Monaco, the Musicalta Academy in France, Music Village in Greece, and the Boya Festival in China.
Violaine Darmon – Violin
Born in 1990, Violaine Darmon studied at the Nancy Regional Conservatoire, where, at the age of twelve, she was unanimously awarded first prizes in violin and chamber music in Marthe Tercieux’s class. She was subsequently admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, graduating in 2009 with prizes in violin and chamber music under Michael Hentz and Daria Hovora. She also studied with distinguished musicians including Bruno Pasquier, Michel Moragues, Roland Pidoux, Marc Coppey, and Théodore Paraschivesco. She then continued her training at the Scuola Musicale di Fiesole, joining Pavel Vernikov’s class for international competition preparation.
Violaine has also pursued her passion for literature. At the age of eighteen, she won Le Manuscrit publishing house’s online First Novel Competition.
In 2012, she was appointed concertmaster of the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra. Deeply committed to chamber music, she has a particular interest in Baroque and contemporary repertoire. Since 2016, she has performed as leader of the Nice Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, where she has developed several productions combining music and imaginative worlds for young audiences.
Violaine is a prizewinner of several international competitions, including First Prize at the Joseph Canetti International Violin Competition, Second Prize and the Audience Prize at the Gérardmer International String Competition, and First Prize at the Johannes Brahms International Competition.