DIALOG I

For its second edition, the NIMFA Festival places screen music at the heart of its programme, approaching it as a meeting point between sound, image, movement and the stage. This theme is not limited to music composed to accompany a film: more broadly, it asks how music can extend, displace or contradict the image, while also conjuring a genuine “inner screen” within the listener.

A central programme of this year’s festival, DIALOG I forms part of the international project DIALOG – Across Oceans, developed by Ensemble Mêtis. Bringing together composers of different generations and backgrounds, the concert creates a dialogue between instrumental music, vocal writing, electronics, experimental cinema and musical theatre. It traces a journey from the most intimate forms of listening to an immersive experience in which sound, text, image, light and space become elements of a single dramaturgy.

With Equal and Opposite, Yvette Jackson extends her practice of radio opera. Her composition unfolds recursively: an idea is transformed through a process nested within another process, itself contained within a broader structure. Rather than presenting a single, predetermined narrative, the work creates a sonic space that each listener completes by drawing on personal experiences, memories and knowledge. Here, the screen is a mental one, formed within the imagination of the listener.

Cyril Molesti’s new work explores the construction of vast “sound clouds”. Made up of pitches derived from spectra of varying density, these clouds are distributed across register and time to create evolving pointillistic structures. Orchestration connects their individual points, allowing them to emerge as teeming macro-objects composed of gestures. Harmonic density, filtering, temporal compression and expansion, anamorphosis and instrumental energy all contribute to the creation of a mobile, almost visual sonic material.

Giorgos Koumendakis’ Piano Pieces open up another relationship with the image: that of a landscape reconstructed through memory. Drawn from the world of Mediterranean Desert, they belong to a cycle of twenty-two pieces inspired by Mediterranean flora and fauna. Plants, insects, fish and birds become the protagonists of a sonic map in which nature moves beyond description to acquire an emotional and almost symbolic significance. Performed by Ensemble Mêtis pianist Stéphanos Thomopoulos, the pieces reveal an inner landscape composed of harmonic colours, layers, resonances and memories.

Koumendakis’ writing combines delicacy, concentration and formal coherence, bringing memories of the Mediterranean into dialogue with different traditions of European piano writing.

In Type Writer, written for solo violin, Koumendakis continues his exploration of transformation and memory. The instrumental gesture becomes the bearer of a secret address, like a musical letter whose recipient remains off-screen. Free repetitions and microvariations gradually transform the material, while traces of tradition emerge not as quotations, but as memories passing through the present.

The screen then becomes tangible in a new work developed through NIMAcademy under the mentorship of Martin Matalon: Ji Young creates a live score for Henri Chomette’s Five Minutes of Pure Cinema. In this cine-concert, the music does not simply illustrate the images. It reveals their rhythms, contrasts, textures and tensions, opening up new possibilities of interpretation. The film becomes a visual score with which the musicians engage in real time.

The concert culminates in Alireza Farhang’s COLLAPSE, a triptych for countertenor, ensemble, electronics and image. Beginning with a poem by Claudia Rankine in the first movement and a text by Farhang in the second, the work explores what remains when language begins to fracture. Hugo Arcier’s visual creation, together with Bruno Boulzaguet’s staging and lighting, transforms the concert space into a mental landscape in which the singer’s physical presence confronts his shadow, image and memory. Across the three movements—Within, Texture and Rise—words gradually dissolve into breath, vocal gestures and instrumental resonance.