The Viadana Collective
Our Swiss-Canadian ensemble blends voices and historical instruments, and brings together major figures and rising stars of the international early music scene in exploring both well-known and forgotten repertoire of the late Renaissance and early baroque. We borrow our name from composer Lodovico Grossi da Viadana (c.1560–1627), whose life perfectly straddles those two eras, his pioneering career spanning a quarter-century on either side of the year 1600. He wrote in almost every genre of the time: four and five-part masses and vespers, falsobordoni, litanies, instrumental canzoni and sinfonie, polychoral motets and psalm settings (from double-choir, 8-part music to his monumental Salmi a quattro chori), sacred monodies and concerti for few voices with continuo (which he pioneered in his famous Cento concerti ecclesiastici), secular canzonette, 5-voice madrigals… As such, his output remarkably encapsulates the music of the era our ensemble grounds itself in.

Maximilien Brisson
A leading specialist of historical trombones and critically-acclaimed conductor, Maximilien is a member of I Fedeli, Le Consort laurentien and canticum trombonorum, and has performed with the Freiburger Barockorchester, Akamus, Concerto Palatino, Collegium Vocale Gent, Les Cornets Noirs, I Gemelli, The Toronto Consort and the Zürich Opera, among others. He is lecturer for Baroque Trombone at the University of the Arts Bremen. As a scholar, he has notably presented his research on the monodies of Lodovico Viadana at the MedRen conference in 2019, and his edition of the complete works of Andreas Oswald is pending publication.

An alumnus of the Université de Montréal, McGill University, the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, where he studied early music performance with Catherine Motuz and Charles Toet, Maximilien Brisson has quickly established himself as a leading specialist of historical trombones both in Europe and North America. He has performed with the Freiburger Barockorchester, Akamus, Concerto Palatino, il Gardellino, Collegium Vocale Gent, Les Cornets Noirs, I Gemelli, Les Traversées Baroques, l’Harmonie des Saisons and the Toronto Consort, among others. He is a member of I Fedeli and ¡Sacabuche! and a founding member of canticum trombonorum and Le Consort laurentien, with which he was finalist at the prestigious YorkComp in 2019. He appears on disc with ¡Sacabuche! (Hidden treasures, ATMA), ensemble cantissimo (Choralis Constantinus 1508, Carus), the European Hanseatic Ensemble (Musik aus Alten Hansestädten, Vol. 1, cpo) and Philippe Brach (Le silence des troupeaux, Spectra Musique), and recently recorded his first solo album with Christophe Gauthier and Luc Beauséjour.

Maximilien is lecturer for Baroque Trombone at the University of the Arts Bremen. He also teaches at the MentiParti historical improvisation summer workshop in Basel, and has taught at masterclasses and workshops at the University of Toronto, the San Francisco Early Music Society and the Madison Early Music Festival. Also active as a scholar and editor, his current interests include the works of Lodovico Viadana, Andreas Oswald and František Ignác Tůma as well as organological research on historical trombones.