WORKS

Gérard Pesson

• 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.

Zosha Di Castri

• 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.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

• 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.