Capella Helvetica (CH)

Capella Helvetica combines the research and source-based historical performance of Early Music with entertaining and engaging music-making for today’s diverse audience. It aims to make music of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries accessible to a broad audience and enter into dialogue with it. Our historical wind ensemble performs on cornettos, trombones, dulcians, recorders, and their even rarer comrades such as slide trumpets, douçaines, or pipe and tabor. With creative concert formats, often integrating amateurs or children, the ensemble is creating synergies that break down the walls between the classical musician and listener. In 2023 and 2024 we performed programs focusing on music by Michael Praetorius, Orlando di Lasso, and Italian nuns, as well as creating a standard repertoire for the ensemble that focuses on early instrumental music and the most popular art songs of the Renaissance. In 2025 the ensemble is looking forward to record their first CD recording.
… The Catholic Church of Buchs AG was brought to life with music, dance, and song. The professional Basel-based ensemble, performing on historical wind instruments, enchanted the audience and showed them how nobles danced as far back as 500 years ago. Majestic music-making revealed to both children and adults a new world of the Basse Danse. Particularly impressive were the powerful sounds of the pommer (an early oboe), dulcian (an early bassoon), a Renaissance trumpet, and the cornett (a wooden trumpet-like instrument with finger holes). (Iris Aleit, Buchser Bote, 19 June 2024)
… Capella Helvetica, together with the Singstimmen Basel Land, filled the Paulus Culture Church with sound. The five musicians from five different countries first met in Basel at the Schola Cantorum to breathe new life into dusty Renaissance music – and that is exactly what they do. The many unusual timbres combined with the Singstimmen produced an impressive result, culminating in the audience joining in for the finale. An evening that enchanted and truly awakened the anticipation of Christmas. (Mélanie Honegger, Basler Zeitung, 4 December 2023)

Fascinated since childhood by the voice and the permeability between art forms, Charles Barbier is equally comfortable singing across his entire vocal range as he is conducting choirs, orchestras, and operas, proposing transdisciplinary and heritage projects, or uniting diverse energies. He began his journey in the Maîtrise de Bretagne before continuing his education as the first student at the CNSMD de Paris to study in both the music (voice, choral conducting) and dance departments. He then pursued a dual program in orchestral and choral conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (FIN) before returning to train in contemporary circus performance at the amateur school of the Académie Fratellini. A versatile artist, Charles Barbier has cultivated an international career as singer, dancer, acrobat, and conductor spanning nearly 25 years, bringing him to over 30 countries. Since 2018, he has been expanding his activities in Switzerland, taking on the artistic direction of the Ensemble Vocal de Saint-Maurice and becoming the cultural season programmer at the Abbey of Saint-Maurice (CH).
… Conductor, tenor, soprano, singer with the Gregorian Choir of Paris, founder of the ensemble L’Échelle, in love with the Renaissance, dazzled by his contemporaries – the young Barbier embraces everything, truly everything, from the 7th to the 21st century. A phenomenon. …(Ivan A. Alexandre, Diapason, 2016)

Katharina Haun was born in Austria has studied cornetto and recorder at the Kunstuniversität Graz, Mozarteum Salzburg (AUT), and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (CH). Working internationally as an instrumentalist, conductor, pedagogue, and researcher, Katharina has made it her aim to connect these different facets of her varied career. As an active performer, she has appeared with ensembles including Leones or La Cetra and in the series “Abendmusiken in der Predigerkirche”. She is also the founder of Capealla Helvetica, a Basel based ensemble that has concertized throughout Europe. Her research on Music of the Habsburg Empire has been published in “De Musica Disseranda 2017”. She is regularly invited as a guest conductor and teacher at various schools and workshops, including Renaissancemusikwoche Sondershausen (DE) or Privatuniversität Wien (AT) or Universidad Central de Bogotá (CO).

Adam Bregman plays historical trombones from every era, appearing with such European and American ensembles as Capella Helvetica (Switzerland), Ciaramella (Los Angeles), Oltremontano (Belgium), Piffaro, the Renaissance Band (Philadelphia), and the Huelgas Ensemble (Belgium). As a teacher of early brass and historical performance practice, he has co-directed the Indiana Early Double Reed and Sackbut Workshop since 2013 and, since 2017, has taught live and online classes for the San Francisco Early Music Society, where he is co-director of the Medieval and Renaissance Summer Workshop. Adam earned a PhD in historical musicology at the University of Southern California. His most recent work includes a collaboration on a facsimile edition and study of Margaret of Austria’s basse danse manuscript (Alamire, 2022) and “The Hermaphroditic Nature of the Mi-Fa Complex,” a chapter in Explorations in Music and Esotericism (Boydell & Brewer, 2023).

Maruša Brezavšček is a Slovenian recorder player, specialising in early and contemporary music, and is also active as a performer on the baroque bassoon and dulcian. She teaches recorder at the Ljubljana Academy of Music in Slovenia and is based in Basel, Switzerland. She has been the recipient of numerous prestigious accolades, including first prizes at the TARF 3 (Tel Aviv Recorder Competition) in 2020 in two distinct categories and first prize at the ERPS (European Recorder Players Society) Competition in Graz (2016). In September 2021, she received the Ivan Werner Award for artistic achievement for her performance as a soloist with the ensemble Musica Cubicularis at the Varaždinske Barokne Većeri festival. She has also been awarded grants from the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, Fundacija Viktoria, the Municipality of Ljubljana and the Lyra Foundation in Switzerland.