Ensemble Mêtis
DIALOG I
An immersive evening of contemporary music bringing together chamber works, live cinema and musical theatre.
PROGRAMME
Equal and Opposite** (2026) — 9′
For countertenor, violin and cello.
Commission of ensemble Mêtis.
New Work* (2026) — 8′
For flute, saxophone, piano, viola, cello and double bass.
Commission of ensemble Mêtis.
Piano Pieces** (2021) — 10′
For piano.
Five Minutes of Pure Cinema* (2026) — 5′
Cine-concert for violin, viola and double bass.
Music for Henri Chomette’s Five Minutes of Pure Cinema (1926). Composed as part of NIMAcademy under the mentorship of Martin Matalon.
COLLAPSE, triptych (2026)
I. Within** — 10′
II. Texture* — 15′
III. Rise* — 5′
For flute, saxophone, countertenor voice, piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass and electronics.
Three movements from the COLLAPSE series.
Commission of ensemble Mêtis.
Poem for the first movement: Claudia Rankine
Text for the second movement: Alireza Farhang
Visuals: Hugo Arcier
Performers
Keiko Murakami: flute
Alberto Chaves: saxophone
Léopold Gilloots-Laforge: countertenor
Stefanos Thomopoulos: piano
Violaine Darmon: violin
Yona Zekri: viola
Justine Péré: cello
Noé Constant: double bass
Alireza Farhang: keyboard
Monica Gil Giraldo: computer music design
Étienne Haan: conductor
Bruno Boulzaguet: stage direction and lighting conception
Total duration: 69′
* World Premiere
** French Premiere
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.
WORKS
Yvette Jackson
Equal and Opposite** (2026) — 9′
For countertenor, violin and cello.
Commission of ensemble Mêtis.
Equal and Opposite forms part of Jackson’s radio opera practice, in which composition unfolds recursively: an idea is transformed through a process nested within another process, itself contained within yet another. The result is a reflection in sound that invites listeners to draw on their own experiences and knowledge to construct the narrative. Yvette Jackson.
Cyril Molesti
New Work* (2026) — 8′
For flute, saxophone, piano, viola, cello and double bass.
Commission of ensemble Mêtis.
My composition for Ensemble Mêtis will revisit several ideas first explored in my most recent ensemble work, Les Nuées ou la disparition de Fomalhaut B, which I would now like to develop further—namely, the construction of large-scale formal phrases that bring different sound clouds into relation. These clouds consist of pitches derived from spectra of varying density, distributed across register and time to create more or less homogeneous masses of sound. These abstract, pointillistic structures come to life through orchestration—a decisive stage that connects the different “points”—forming teeming macro-objects composed of gestures whose complexity can vary. The control of parameters within each cloud—such as harmonic density and filtering, temporal expansion and compression, deformation or anamorphosis, the degree of heterogeneity among instrumental gestures, and their “energy”—will contribute to the construction of a coherent musical discourse, as will the relationships between the clouds themselves through superimposition, overlap, interpolation and contrast. Cyril Molesti.
Giorgos Koumendakis
Piano Pieces** (2021) — 10′
For piano.
Ji Young
Five Minutes of Pure Cinema* (2026) — 5′
For violin, viola and double bass.
Music for Henri Chomette’s Five Minutes of Pure Cinema (1926). Composed as part of NIMAcademy under the mentorship of Martin Matalon.
Alireza Farhang
COLLAPSE, triptych (2026)
I. Within** — 10′
II. Texture** — 15′
III. Rise** — 5′
In COLLAPSE, Alireza Farhang asks what remains when language can no longer contain experience. The work takes as its starting point a poem by Claudia Rankine, while Farhang himself writes the original text of the second movement. Countertenor, instrumental ensemble, electronics and images by Hugo Arcier inhabit a single theatrical space in which no element merely accompanies or illustrates another. Voice, instruments, images, staging and light continually reshape one another, blurring the boundaries between presence, memory and disappearance.
The work unfolds as a thirty-five-minute triptych. In Within, the full ensemble appears in a relatively familiar concert setting. Rankine’s words introduce a world of falling, touch, fracture and endurance. In Texture, the perspective narrows. Farhang’s text, conceived as a close-up rather than an adaptation of Rankine’s poem, stages an elusive dialogue between a Voice and its Shadow. The countertenor moves from singing towards spoken language, accompanied by baritone saxophone, viola and electronics, while the visual dimension becomes increasingly prominent. Words break apart into repetitions, consonants, breath and silence. The body itself seems to become unstable, evoking the tension and distortion found in the paintings of Francis Bacon. In Rise, the full ensemble returns in a spatially divided configuration. Language gradually disappears, leaving vocal gestures, resonance and the fragile impulse to stand again.
Bruno Boulzaguet’s staging and lighting make the performance space an active part of this transformation. Light does not merely illuminate the performers: it reveals, isolates and erases, continually shifting the relationship between the physical body, its projected image and the surrounding space. During the second movement, the stage gradually takes on the character of an interior chamber, drawing the audience into an intimate and uncertain encounter with the singer. In the final section, the spatial division of the ensemble and the changing light reorganise the stage once more, sustaining the work’s unresolved movement between falling and rising.
COLLAPSE does not tell a conventional story or offer a final resolution. It traces a transformation of perception. As text, sound and image begin to lose their separate identities, the audience is drawn from observing a figure into sharing an interior state. Collapse here is not simply destruction: it is the moment when familiar forms come apart and another kind of presence becomes perceptible, a breath, a vibration, a body that falters yet remains.