Created in 1996 by Rolandas Muleika, its artistic director, the Antiphona Ensemble promotes a vast vocal repertoire and endeavours to (re)discover some forsaken though remarkable works dating back from the Gregorian period up to the 19th century. The Antiphona Ensemble devotes all of its voices to serving early types of music from Perotin’s polyphonies and Monteverdi’s madrigals to the finest pages of Baroque music all over Europe. Among its latest ‘coups de coeur’ stand out Bernard-Aymable Dupuy and Joseph Vallette-de-Montigny the talented composers who used to live in Toulouse as well as Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka whose emotional expression is close to Bach and Mozart’s. Eager to promote the musical heritage of their region, Rolandas Muleika and the Antiphona Ensemble have devoted the largest part of their yearly programming to Villefranche-de-Rouergue’s manuscripts for quite a few years. This collection of unpublished archives of outstanding musical quality, totally forgotten and bound to disappear, is being minutelyrestored and preserved. Thanks to its musicological and stylistic expertise, the Antiphona Ensemble can revive musical pieces by performing them aptly with respect to the specificities of each period, each place or each composer. But the Antiphona Ensemble is also determined to re-interpret this early music repertoire by blending it with contemporary pieces or pieces taken from the traditional repertoire. Thus the Ensemble re-creates some musical forms while modernizing them at the same time. For instance, a contemporary piece on the theme of the Way of Saint James especially composed for us or a new version of the first act of Monteverdi’s Orfeo with a percussion ensemble are part of next season’s programme.
