Nico Muhly & Benjamin Millepied: The Bell Études

With pianist Conor Hanick and L.A. Dance Project

Produced by Liquid Music and L.A. Dance Project
In development

Longtime collaborators Nico Muhly and Benjamin Millepied reunite for The Bell Études, a new work transforming pedagogy into the profound. Built around a set of piano études composed for Conor Hanick, whose playing The New York Times deemed “breathtaking… at once penetrating and mystifying,” each piece takes on a single technical challenge and refracts it into something chiming, crystalline, and insistent. Two daring artists and “partners in space and sound” (The New York Times), Muhly and Millepied elevate the rigor of practice into a live dialogue of music and movement.

About the Artists

Nico Muhly (b. 1981) composes orchestral, chamber, and sacred music, operas, and scores for film, theatre and television and site-specific collaborations. He has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (Two Boys and Marnie), Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic (including a concerto grosso), the Philharmonie de Paris (a concerto for two pianos for Katia and Marielle Labèque) and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he is composer-in-residence. He has collaborated with choreographers Kyle Abraham, Benjamin Millepied, and Justin Peck, and his vocal collaborators include Iestyn Davies, Renée Fleming, and Nicholas Phan. Among his concerti are works for violin (Pekka Kuusisto and Renaud Capuçon), viola (Nadia Sirota), trumpet (Tine Thing Helseth), organ (James McVinnie) and piano (Alexandre Tharaud). He’s been composer-in-residence at Christ Church, Oxford since 2026, and the same year saw single-composer releases from Magdalen College, Oxford, and The Tallis Scholars.  

Benjamin Millepied is a French choreographer, director, and former Principal Dancer with New York City Ballet. He has created works for many of the world’s leading dance companies, including New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, Staatsballett Berlin, and the Mariinsky Ballet, collaborating with artists and composers including Barbara Kruger, Mark Bradford, Christopher Wool, Daniel Buren, Nico Muhly, and Gabriella Smith.

In 2010, Millepied choreographed and performed in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. He co-founded L.A. Dance Project in 2012 and served as Director of Dance at the Paris Opera from 2014 to 2016, where he commissioned a new generation of choreographers and launched major artistic, digital, and health initiatives.

Millepied made his feature-film directorial debut with Carmen, starring Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal, released by Sony Pictures Classics in 2023. His recent stage works include Romeo & Juliet, presented in Paris and in a three-week season at New York’s Park Avenue Armory; Be Here Now, created with Barbara Kruger and Gabriella Smith; and Me.You.We.They, with composer Nico Muhly.

Based in Paris, Millepied co-founded Paris Dance Project, dedicated to artistic creation, education, and expanding access to dance. In November 2026, he will present three new productions at the Folies Bergère: Barbara — Du Bout des lèvres, Summerland with November Ultra, and Move Me Once More, an original musical conceived and written with Léa Mysius.

Working across dance, film, theater, and music, Millepied continues to develop new forms of performance and storytelling. He was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 2024.

Pianist Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master.” (New York Times) Hanick has worked with conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ludovic Morlot, Alan Gilbert, and David Robertson; collaborated with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Orchestra Iowa, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Juilliard Orchestra; and been presented by the Gilmore Festival, New York Philharmonic, Elbphilharmonie, De Singel, Centre Pompidou, Cal Performances, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Park Avenue Armory, and the Ojai Festival, where in 2022 with AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) he served as the festival’s artistic director and where in 2026 he was a featured artist under director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

A fierce advocate for the music of today, Hanick has premiered over 200 pieces and collaborated with composers ranging from Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, to the leading composers of his generation, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, Marcos Balter, and Samuel Carl Adams, whose piano concerto, No Such Spring, he premiered in 2023 with Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony. This season Hanick presents solo and chamber recitals in the US and Europe, including concerts at the Barbican Centre, Cal Performances, Da Camera, Kaufman Center, and Aviva Studios Manchester, where he’ll join the BBC Philharmonic in the UK premiere of No Such Spring. He also appears with Orchestra Iowa, Ensemble New SRQ, and AMOC*, and collaborates Julia Bullock, Seth Parker Woods, Jay Campbell, and Sandbox Percussion, including the premiere of new works by Tania León, Samuel Adams, Marcos Balter, and others.

Hanick is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and serves on the faculty of The Juilliard School, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Mannes College at The New School. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School and lives with his family in the Hudson Valley.