Yet another Baroque soloist ensemble?! Not quite. Much like this site, we hope, somewhat unusual, sober and personal at the same time. At the heart of the Texto Ensemble lies a paradox:

On the one hand, the will to selflessly serve a composer, reflect the spirit of an era, a life cycle function, a cultural context, not in order to claim this or that illusion of Truth, rather to try and understand what we have in common through that which we no longer do.

On the other hand, the conviction that it is our duty to be as personal as possible, to quite consciously venture deep within our own experiences, our ideas and insights, if we are to hope that, but for a moment, a new angle may open and contribute to the collective edifice of a work’s apperception, without veering from interpretation to adaptation, nor trying to impress rather than simply express.

Thus, you will not find here ornate anachronistic Rococo tinsels, nor will this be a blog retracing each and every step we take throughout the day. No concert photos or stodgy group portraits on a flight of stairs outside the church; simply us, through the eyes of our photographer, Camille Greffin.

Opting for a reduced scale (generally one singer or instrumentalist per part), we aim to take the spirit of our reading out of the concert hall and into a more intimate setting, with a closer, warmer contact between the musicians and the public, introducing expressive commitment to every musical line, choral and orchestral alike.

The first few concert programs proposed by the Texto Ensemble bring together diverse aspects of the 17th and 18th century vocal music, opposing, for the duration of an evening, the secular to the sacred, the Theater to the Church (or to the Synagogue, in the case of our first CD record), the North to the South, in order to distill a unifying essence and try to better understand what it means to be human.