Mise en Abyme

It explores the process of collaboration and co-authorship, illuminating the development of musical ideas through the performance itself.

This is the Irish premiere concert by le NEC and features powerful music for strings, piano and live electronics with transforming lighting design and holographic projections. The project was premiered on May 7th 2017 in Maison du Concert, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

An extract of Mise en Abyme can be found here.

About the composers

Ruaidhri Mannion is an Irish composer and sonic artist who is currently completing his doctorate at the Royal College of Music. He began his composition studies with Piers Hellawell at Queen’s University in Belfast and specialises in combining electronic sounds with classical instruments and multimedia to create immersive and evocative live concert experiences. He releases experimental pop-electronica music under the alias iaMrhinoandRuin. 

Past work includes a commission for the Whitecube Gallery, London to compose music for the ‘Tribunal of the Dusk’ installation; a saxophone sextet commission for the Royal Academy of Art's 'Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined' exhibition; and an interactive electroacoustic performance at the Tate Modern's critically acclaimed 'Matisse: The Cut-Outs' exhibition. To discover further information aboutRuaidhri and his work click here. 

Benoît Moreau works in the fields of improvised music and composition. Using the piano, the clarinet, electronic instruments or writing, he also confronts music to film, performance and theatre. With improvisation at its core, his approach departs from the influence of conventional wisdom in composition. As a composer, however, his work precisely avoids the constraints inherent to improvisation. In both cases, his main source of inspiration is all that sound material contains, whether very physic or not. He is a co-founder of the North Street Association dedicated to improvised music. For more information about Beniot click here. 

The Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain (NEC) was created in 1994 in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. It is currently composed of 20 permanent professional musicians from all over Switzerland, all curious, idealistic, and enthusiastic and showered with all manner of accolades and awards. It wishes to allow the  multiple facets of 20th and 21st century music to be heard, encourage the blossoming of new talents by regularly ordering new creations and build bridges between different methods of expression.

Its principal conductor, Pierre-Alain Monot, regularly shares his rostrum with guests, such as Pierre Bartholomée, Jürg Wyttenbach and Heinrich Schiff among others. NEC concerts have also featured performances by top-ranking visiting soloists: Maria Riccarda Wesseling, Philippe Huttenlocher, Donatienne Michel-Dansac, Kornelia Bruggmann, Brigitte Hool, Jeannine Hirzel, Daniel Gloger, Patrick Demenga, Otto Katzameier … to name but a few. To learn more about the NECclick here.