| 8 July 2026 | |
| 17 h 00 min | |
| Fribourg, Suisse | |
| International Festival of Sacred Music | |
| Google Map |
This program carries the echo of the Thebaids, across various places, religions, languages, and eras.
A tribute to female spirituality, it is the fruit gathered from our own deserts, where the taste for questioning, doubt, and wonder is shared. Symbolic of a chosen, intimate solitude, or of a real, physical desert, these two spaces resonate in their vastness. Medieval music, poetry, and contemporary music invite us to traverse them.
The desert of Thebes was the refuge of the earliest Christians; since then, any place—real or symbolic—where one withdraws to lead a life of asceticism and prayer, “emptying” oneself of the world to attain a second birth, has been called a Thebaid. Evocative of withdrawal and trial, but also a place of revelation, the desert connects the three monotheistic religions.
In the Middle Ages, in the West, it referred to hermitages, forests, islands, and monasteries. As a metaphor for solitary life where one contemplates the “invisible realities,” it is a space to pray and sing.
Among the Sufis, the Khalwa refers both to the act of isolation and to the place itself—the natural world, the desert, the cave, or the cell. It is a path of knowledge through “illumination and spiritual openness.”
The use of song, the breath embodied in sound, has always been associated with worship as a means of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.
In the Christian Middle Ages, we draw from the Las Huelgas manuscript, a women’s monastery founded in the 12th century in Spain—a land where East and West converged for centuries. The deserts of the East are evoked through the voice of Alia Sellami, singing Sufi pieces transmitted orally from generation to generation.
Today’s Thebaids are present through a contemporary piece, Khalwa by Alia Sellami, as well as improvisations.
With:
Laurence Brisset – conductor and organetto
Alia Sellami – Arabic singing and improvisation
Hélène Richer – soprano
Ariane Wohlhuter – soprano
Eugénie De Mey – mezzo-soprano
Caroline Tarrit – mezzo-soprano