Les Argonautes

The members of the Swiss early music group Les Argonautes take an intensely collaborative approach to their music-making. Formed in the late 2010s, the group was quickly signed to the major Aparte label. Les Argonautes was formed by conductor and multi-instrumentalist Jonas Descotte, a student of conductor Natalie Stutzmann at the Haute École de Musique in Geneva, Switzerland. Descotte, a native of the Canary Islands, spent six years at sea with his family on a catamaran and then took up countertenor singing, various instruments, and conducting at the Conservatoire de Toulon and then, in 2016, at the Haute École de Musique. Shortly after that, he formed Les Argonautes, taking the group's name from the Greek-Roman myth of Jason and the Argonauts, who take to the seas in a ship called the Argo in search of the golden fleece of a flying ram. The name provided more than general inspiration; Descotte conceived of the group as one where members would bring individual talents to the effort to achieve a greater goal, much as, in the group's words, "Tiphys flies the Argo, while Argos built it. Jason is the instigator of the epic, and Orpheus gives the rhythm to the rowers from his lyre." Les Argonautes is very flexible in its make-up, changing forces according to the needs of individual performance projects. Although Descotte serves as artistic director, programs are devised by various members of the group. Descotte continued to hold the position of artistic director as of the early 2020s. At first, Les Argonautes performed mostly in the Geneva area, sometimes collaborating with the Grand Théâtre de Genève. As of early 2023, it has four programs in its repertory: "Komm," featuring the complete motets of Bach; "Dixit Dominus," including settings of that text by Handel and Lotti; "Messe en ut," built around Mozart's Mass in C minor, K. 427; and "Dido & Aeneas," featuring not only that Henry Purcell opera but a set of incidental music pieces by the same composer for a play called Circe. That program formed the basis for the first Les Argonautes album, released on Aparte in 2022.
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