As part of the Présences 2026 festival organized by Radio France, Multilatérale presents La Nuit en Tête, a musical journey in which voice and sonic gesture question our relationship to language, identity, and the collective.

The evening opens with La Nuit en Tête by Georges Aperghis, an emblematic work conceived as an interweaving of autonomous fragments. Here, night appears less as a setting than as a mental state: an unstable, obsessive substance, shot through with restrained energies, harmonic iridescences, and micro-intervals.

Two world premieres extend this exploration of contemporary tensions. Énantiosème by Nicolas Tzortzis, for flute and ensemble (a commission from Radio France), sets two conceptions of identity against one another: one fluid and shifting, the other fixed and normative. Two musical entities follow their own trajectories, meeting, confronting, or ignoring each other, in a sonic metaphor for today’s polarizations.

In Whiteout by Eva Reiter, a co-commission from Radio France and the Multilatérale Ensemble, voice, ensemble, and electronics unfold within a continuum inspired by a text by Henri Michaux. “White” here becomes a sonic flow — dazzling, saturated, fragile — in which perception blurs and time seems suspended.

The voice then becomes portrait and memory in Musiciens, portraits by Jacques Rebotier, before Messe, un jour ordinaire by Bernard Cavanna brings the evening to a close. A major work, poised between oratorio and opera, it confronts intimate, everyday speech with the dogmatic discourse of the Mass, in a form sustained by continuous expressive tension.

Broadcast live on France Musique, presented by Arnaud Merlin

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