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Ensemble Oneiroï

Trois Anneaux — et autres récits décaméronesques (also performed in Italian as Tre Anelli) is a musical stage production inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron (1313–1375). Florence, 1348: as plague ravages Europe, a group of young people takes refuge in the countryside, surviving through storytelling and song. The Decameron, a treasury of fourteenth-century sensibility, guides its audience into a world where the cultures of East and West speak to each other across the Mediterranean.

The music draws on repertoires distant in both space and time: medieval manuscripts that survived the vicissitudes of history, ancient melodies transmitted orally, instrumental improvisations (taksimat) following the modes (maqâm) of the Near East and North Africa, and original compositions. Sources are chosen for their connection to the places named in the tales: the Reina manuscript, the Squarcialupi codex, the London manuscript, the Spanish Cantigas. The instruments on stage are themselves travellers: the oud, the prince of instruments in North African and Middle Eastern cultures; the chitarrino, its medieval Western cousin; the fiddle, the beloved companion of love poets across medieval Europe; flutes, bound to dance and conviviality since ancient times.

Three stories are told through instruments and voices: fiddle, flute, oud, chitarrino, and song alternate and interweave with the narration in a programme including music by Thibaut de Champagne, Lorenzo da Firenze, Francesco Landini, Guillaume de Machaut, anonymous pieces from the 12th to the 14th century, and original compositions by Sara Maria Fantini. On stage: Sara Maria Fantini (oud, chitarrino), Maud Haering (soprano), Valentine Lorentz (fiddle, recorder), and a storyteller (Sylvie Mombo/Julia Alimasi). The show, produced by Ensemble Oneiroï in co-production with the Fondation Royaumont and the DRAC Île-de-France, is available in a school version (1h) and a full-length version (1h20). With more than forty performances to its credit, Trois Anneaux has toured throughout France as both a concert programme and a workshop for children and young audiences, and has been included in the 2025-2026 season of the Jeunesses Musicales de France.

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Ensemble Oneiroï → JM France →

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Rubens Rosa

Since 2024 Sara Maria Fantini has worked with Rubens Rosa (a young medieval music ensemble based in Basel, co-directed by Aliénor Wolteche and Matthieu Romanens) playing gittern and medieval lute. With the ensemble, she has performed at numerous festivals, including Erasmus Klingt in Basel (CH), Erice International Early Music Festival (IT), and Medimus in Prizren (KS).

Trobar a l'entorn dels Pirineus

From Provence to Castile with Guiraut Riquier, the last troubadour

In 1269 Guiraut Riquier (1250–1292) left Narbonne, crossed the Pyrenees and joined the court of Alfonso X the Wise, where French, Occitan, Islamic and Jewish cultures coexisted. He arrived just as the Cantigas de Santa Maria were being compiled: melodies with striking links to his own Marian songs and, more broadly, to the troubadour repertoire. The programme interweaves the two, following the chronological thread of the La Vallière chansonnier, which gathers Riquier's entire output dated and arranged in order — a rigour of transmission unique for the period.

With Matthieu Romanens (voice) and Aliénor Wolteche (fiddles).

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The autumn of monophony

Two repertoires that mirror one another: the sea of Vigo and the Mediterranean, the cantigas de amigo of Martin Codax and the monophonic ballate of the Rossi and Squarcialupi codices, often copied in to fill the lower margins of the manuscripts. The common ground is secular monody, which around the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries reaches its autumn and finally disappears from the written sources in favour of polyphony. To shape the accompaniment of the voices the ensemble turned to the istampitte of the London Codex, a dictionary of the instrumental language of the century.

With Colin Heller (fiddle), Gabriele Miracle (percussion), Matthieu Romanens (voice).

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Las Kiras

Las Kiras is an all-female quartet born from the meeting of Sara Maria Fantini (oud and gittern), Laia Blasco (voice), Berta Ares (fiddle and violin) and Ana Nicolás de Cabo (historical and traditional percussion). Berta Ares, Laia Blasco and Ana Nicolás have played together for years within BallArte Ensemble, where they have explored the scenic possibilities of early music performance; with Sara Maria Fantini, whom they met at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, they share a passion for traditional musics and for the medieval repertoire, and an interest in what emerges when the two are set in dialogue. The group came together around a common purpose: to give a hearing back to the women that music history has left in the margins.

Siamo tutte

Women's voices in the medieval Mediterranean

In 1405 Christine de Pizan completed The Book of the City of Ladies, written in answer to the prevailing image of women's role in the Middle Ages: in it she gathers the stories of one hundred and sixty-five women to show that this role was a social construct, and that women could be as capable and virtuous as men.
From that legacy comes Siamo tutte, a musical journey through the medieval Mediterranean gathering the voices of women from different territories, cultures and social conditions: the Occitan trobairitz Castelloza and the Countess of Dia, the Andalusi poets Hamda bint Ziyād, Hafsa bint Hamdun and Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, alongside the words of Christine de Pizan herself. The concert interweaves medieval repertoires with living Mediterranean traditions — Andalusi, Sephardic and Occitan music, and pieces transmitted orally — together with original compositions and arrangements, several of them by Sara Maria Fantini, crossing languages, borders and cultures to show how strongly these women's experiences still resonate today.
Siamo tutte is, in the end, an invitation to listen to those forgotten voices and to recognise in them a shared inheritance: that of women who wrote, sang, loved, thought and created, leaving a trace that deserves to be heard again.

With Laia Blasco (voice), Berta Ares (fiddle and violin) and Ana Nicolás de Cabo (percussion). Duration 60 minutes. First residency in June 2026; second residency and premiere in Basel in December 2026.