Ensemble Contrechamps: Autorretrato extendido

Contrechamps is an ensemble of soloists specialized in creating, developing, and disseminating instrumental music of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Ensemble is dedicated to highlighting the diversity of aesthetics and formats making up the contemporary and experimental scene. For over 40 years the Ensemble Contrechamps has been working hand in hand with a large number of composers, conductors, and artists such as Rebecca Saunders, Pierre Boulez, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Christine Sun Kim, Michael Jarrell, Jacques Demierre, Olga Kokcharova, Sofia Jernberg, Vimbayi Kaziboni and Heinz Holliger, among others. The Ensemble also showcases the multiple skills and unique talents of its member musicians. 

Contrechamps strives to develop fresh formats such as installation-performances, radiophonic concerts, research laboratories, and collaborative processes. The Ensemble is a hybrid, both orchestra and collective, which enables it to adapt to a variety of artistic constraints and to the proposals of the artists it works with. Within this context, Contrechamp’s partnership with the Geneva Haute école de musique is meaningful inasmuch as it allows its members to remain in touch with the freshest ideas, as well as impart their expertise to coming generations. 

Contrechamps is renowned for its accomplishments and is a regular guest on international stages and at prominent festivals such as the Ircam, Paris Festival d’Automne, the Salzburger Festspiele, MaerzMusik in Berlin, the Lucerne Festival, the Venice Biennale, and the London ICA. The Ensemble’s many partners in Geneva include La Bâtie, Archipel, the Grand Théâtre, the Ensemble Vide, the OCG, the Théâtre Am Stram Gram, the ADC,the cave12, and the St. Pierre Cathedral. Contrechamps has performed on a variety of stages throughout Switzerland like the Gare du Nord in Basel, Schauspielhaus in Zurich, and Plateforme 10 in Lausanne, to name just a few. A colorful outreach program and exciting educational activities involving schools and museums allow its musicians to impart their passion to a public of all ages and from all walks of life, and to enrich and fortify the local cultural fabric. 

Éditions Contrechamps publishes significant books on contemporary music. The Ensemble has made over twenty recordings and, since last season, has been offering a new collection of vinyls on its own Contrechamps label in collaboration with Speckled-Toshe.

Swiss-Colombian designer, sound artist, and composer Daniel Zea lives and works in Geneva. His artistic universe revolves around instrumental and electroacoustic music, hybrid performances combining video, sound, gesture capture systems, and physical computing, as well as programming. He regularly collaborates on interdisciplinary projects (visual arts, choreography, performance, etc.) and teaches at the Haute école d'art et de design (Interactivity and Programming Laboratory) and the Geneva University of Music (Creative Experimentation Workshop). He is involved in the artistic direction of the Vortex ensemble, of which he is a founding member, working both as a composer and performer of electroacoustic music. In his work, Zea takes a questioning and critical look at our society's relationship with digital technology, sometimes with a kind of political engagement that is not without humor. 

Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC) and “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald), multi-award winning Canadian composer and filmmaker Nicole Lizée explores themes of malfunction, glitch, turntablism, rave culture, urbex, film theory, psychedelia, game culture, experimental fashion, and thrash metal to create a new kind of expression. Lizée’s compositions feature unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, turntables, vintage board games, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, Ouija boards, pop rocks candy, and karaoke tapes. Lizée’s works are regularly performed worldwide to international acclaim. Her commission list of over 60 works includes the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Bang On A Can, So Percussion, National Arts Centre Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and the Donaueschingen Festival. Awards include a JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year, the Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera, Prix Opus for Composer of the Year, and the Canada Council Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music.