Lucile Tessier

One of the few musicians to specialize in the Baroque bassoon and oboe, multi-instrumentalist Lucile Tessier, who also plays recorders, leads her own group, Ensemble Leviathan. She is also a Sorbonne-trained musicologist, and she devises programs rooted in her own research. Tessier began studies on the recorder at a young age. She studied at the Conservatoire du Grand Besançon Métropole (the CNR) with Cécile Roumy and then Clémence Comte, earning a degree in recorder and chamber music in 2007. Gradually, she expanded her work into Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical bassoons and Renaissance and Baroque oboes. Tessier moved to Paris for studies with recorder player Sébastien Marq and bassoonist Mélanie Flahaut; while there, she also entered the musicology program at the Sorbonne, graduating with a thesis on the relationship between French and English stage music in the late 17th century. Tessier also studied at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, with flutist Pedro Memelsdorff and Baroque bassoonist and dulcian player Pep Borras, and at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland, with medieval flutist Corina Marti. She went on to the Lyon Conservatory (the CNSM) for more work with flutist and recorder player Pierre Hamon, receiving a performance degree in 2012. Tessier rounded off her education with participation in classes with Hervé Niquet at the Académie d'Ambronay in 2012, and in the Orchester Français des Jeunes, under the direction of Reinhard Goebel, in 2011 and 2012. In the 2010s, Tessier was heard in a wide variety of early music groups led by top French musicians, including Les Sacqueboutiers de Toulouse, the Chapelle Rhénane, Les Surprises, and Clémence Comte's Ensemble Les Alizes, among others. Tessier founded Ensemble Leviathan in 2015 and remained the group's artistic director as of the early 2020s. The first program she devised for that group was rooted in her Sorbonne research, and she has gone on to create other thematic Baroque concerts devoted to the Italian Baroque, Handel, and French music of the 18th century. The group quickly found bookings at such Paris venues as the Hôtel de Soubise and the Petit Palais art museum and at festivals around France and beyond, including the Festival de Pontoise, the Festival Baroque de Tarentaise, the Musicales de Normandie, and the Ars Ramovš festival in Slovenia. In 2021, Tessier served a residency at Versailles palace. In 2022, Tessier and Ensemble Leviathan made their recording debut on the Harmonia Mundi label with Music for Lady Louise, which included music by John Blow, Purcell, Lully, and Matthew Locke and focused on the cultural milieu surrounding Louise de Penancoët de Keroual, or Lady Louise, a spy employed by Louis XIV who became the mistress of King Charles II of England.
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