Paris, April 8, 2025 – Little Tribeca is pleased to announce that the ensemble Thélème is joining its roster. This iconoclastic group, founded in 2013 by Jean-Christophe Groffe, is made up of musicians from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, a renowned institution for early music performance.
Driven by a deep understanding of the repertoire and a clear taste for offbeat paths, Thélème explores Renaissance music with singular freedom, blending historical instruments (lute, viols) and electronic sounds (modular synthesizers, Ondes Martenot), while crossing disciplines – theatre, dance, writing – to invent a living, vibrant, and resolutely contemporary language.
Highly acclaimed by critics and audiences, Thélème has released two albums on the Aparté label:
– Baisiez-moi (2022), dedicated to Josquin Desprez, brings together twenty vocal pieces, some of which are rarely recorded, culminating in a world premiere: Tant vous aimme. Faithful to Josquin’s polyphonic spirit with its 2, 4, sometimes 7 male voices, the album stands out through its bold use of modern instruments: Ondes Martenot, Fender Rhodes, and Buchla synthesizer breathe new life into iconic works like La Bernardina and Mille regretz. The album received the prestigious Gramophone Award in the Early Music category in 2022.
– All we get is life (November 2024) imagines a fascinating dialogue between John Dowland and John Cage, bridging Elizabethan melancholy and 20th-century experimentation. Lute pieces, Song Books, electronic textures, and vocal transformations intertwine. The album also features 17-time Grammy Award winning artist Sting, a passionate admirer of Dowland, as a special guest. He delivers a cosmic, intimate version of Shape of My Heart, and appears in the video for Flow My Teares.
With its taste for blending eras and styles, Thélème embodies a joyfully anachronistic and subtly subversive vision of early music. This artistic signature aligns perfectly with Little Tribeca’s mission to support unique artists across the full scope of their creative journey.
View Thélème’s profile on the Little Tribeca agency website
