Gwennaëlle Alibert trained as a pianist, harpsichordist and accompanist, starting at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Switzerland) in 2007, where she was awarded the Masters in harpsichord performance in Jörg-Andreas Bötticher’s class in 2010 (with a mark of “très bien”). That same year she was one of the joint founders of Philomèle, an Early Music ensemble supported by the City of Strasbourg and the DRAC Alsace, which was in residence at the Dominicains de Haute-Alsace in 2015. Gwennaëlle performs regularly with various groups in both Switzerland and France. She currently teaches piano, harpsichord and Early Music, and is also an accompanist at the CRC de Vaulx-en-Velin (Rhône). In 2011 she won a Déclic Jeunes grant from the Fondation de France allowing her to continue her research into the composer Johann Jakob Froberger.
Fabien Armengaud discovered music and had his first musical experiences as a child, in the organ lofts of Auch, with his grandfather Roland Couybes, who was organist at the city’s cathedral. Fabien studied harpsichord and basso continuo with Jan Willem Jansen, Yasuko Bouvard and Laurence Boulay, and then honed his skills with Michèle Dévérité. At the Early Music department of the Conservatoire in Toulouse, he met Hervé Niquet with whom he learned about orchestra work and improved his knowledge of the repertoire for two harpsichords. In 1999, Fabien founded the Baroque ensemble Le Concert Calotin and released two recordings of the work of Louis-Antoine Dornel and Sébastien de Brossard on the Arion label. In 2001, he conducted Monsigny’s “On ne s’avise jamais de tout” at the Bastille Opera House’s amphitheatre.
Thanks to Olivier Schneebeli, in 2000 he joined the Maîtrise du Centre de Musique Baroque in Versailles. Since 2006, he has been the continuo player of Les Pages et Les Chantres and has made many records (Charpentier, Lully, Riegel, Campra) with the group, appearing on stage both in France (Paris, Vézelay, Nantes) and abroad (Miami, Varazdin, Budapest, Zamora, Peking, Seoul). He is often approached by various opera houses (Avignon, Massy) as a choirmaster and as a result has taken part in productions of Lully’s Amadis (2009-2010), and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (2011-2012) and Campra’s Tancrède in 2014.
He loves conducting and studied the discipline with Dominique Rouits and Julien Masmondet. He is an orchestral conducting graduate of the École Normale de Musique. Fabien holds the State diploma in Early Music and has been conducting Les Pages et Les Chantres regularly since 2007. He was appointed head-assistant of the Maîtrise du Centre de Musique Baroque in Versailles in 2013 and in September 2021 he will be taking over the Maîtrise’s musical and educational management.
At the same time as his work at the Centre de Musique Baroque in Versailles, Fabien is also musical director of the Ensemble Sébastien de Brossard. A first recording of Louis-Nicolas Clérambault’s Motets for Three Male Voices was released on Paraty in 2016 and was widely acclaimed in the specialist press. The Ensemble Sébastien de Brossard’s second opus Silentium, a recording of the little descant motets made with Jean-François Novelli for the En Phases label, came out in March 2018.
Fabien Armengaud is a member of Les Entonneurs Rabelaisiens.
Loris Barrucand is originally from Savoy and graduated from the harpsichord and basso continuo classes at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris. His teachers included highly-esteemed musicians such as Olivier Baumont, Blandine Rannou, Christophe Rousset, Stéphane Fuget, Bertrand Cuiller and Françoise Lengellé.
Once he had graduated, Loris Barrucand had the opportunity to work with Les Talens Lyriques, Le Concert Spirituel, Marguerite Louise, Le Poème Harmonique, Les Cris de Paris, Les Surprises, La Tempête and A Nocte Temporis, all of them ensembles that play a major part in European Baroque musical life. He was also a founder member of the Sarbacanes wind ensemble whose first album, Pyrotechnies, will be released in 2024. As an integral member of the cultural democratisation project Opérabus – La Culture devient Mobile, Loris also spends a great deal of time travelling the byways of the Valenciennes and Hauts-de-France regions meeting people from deprived areas.
Although Olivier Baumont was very quickly recognized as an inquisitive, enthusiastic and erudite musician, there has also been acclaim for his acute sense of communication (master classes, conferences, radio and television programs) and his love both of appearing on stage and of sharing his love of the 17th and 18th centuries with other art forms (theatrical productions, artistic direction of the Festival de Champs sur Marne, books). As a result, he has become a multifaceted artist and is in great demand internationally. Olivier Baumont has been invited to appear at all the major French and overseas festivals and has performed in many countries. He has also been responsible for a large number of programs on both radio and television (France-Musique, France-Culture, Radio Suisse Romande, BBC, FR3, Muzzik and Mezzo). He is also a big theatre fan and, amongst other things, worked with Nicolas Vaude and Nicolas Marié on adapting Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau which remains a huge hit twenty years after its performance in 2002!
More information at Olivier Baumont
Anne Marie Dragosits lives in Vienna. She leads an active international concert life as both a soloist and sought-after continuo player and is professor for harpsichord at the Anton-Bruckner-Universität in Linz. Her passionate engagement with historical harpsichords is documented by her previous CD recordings: “ITALIA!” on a Giusti (1681) and a Veronensis (1564), both in Nürnberg’s Germanic Nationalmuseum, and “avec discretion” with music of Froberger on a Girolamo de Zentis (1653) in an English private collection.
Odile Edouard has been a baroque violin teacher at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon since 1996, and is one of the leading figures of the second generation of musicians devoting their careers to performing on historic instruments. Most of her work involves chamber music, along with many solo recitals. As she is keen to continue her research work while at the same time taking a fresh approach to performance, she recently worked alongside Alain Gervreau on his research into the birth of the violin family with the formation of their new Renaissance violin ensemble “Les Sonadori”.
In addition to this, she spent twenty years playing in the “Les Witches” ensemble with whom she worked on theatricality and improvisation. She often performs with the organist and harpsichordist Freddy Eichelberger, and also with Philippe Despont and Alain Gervreau in their “Les Conversations” ensemble. She has appeared at most of the major European festivals and her discography includes more than thirty recordings for Harmonia Mundi, Alpha, L’Encelade, Ligia Digital, Arcana, L'Empreinte Digitale, Hortus, Sinfonia and K617.
If Freddy Eichelberger had not been enjoying his wide-ranging musical experiences so much, he would surely have gone off to live in the tropics, where he spent part of his childhood, and where the flowering poincianas, the taste of pepper, and the smell of earth gorged with warm rain at the full moon left an indelible mark upon him. Having said that, he no longer has any regrets since moving to Marseilles...
Because he has always kept his hand in at improvisation, he has been fortunate enough to meet and play with musicians from various backgrounds, ranging from friends in the jazz world to the great Indian singer Kishori Amonkar. Another result of this is that he often accompanies silent films on all kinds of keyboards (pipe organ, harpsichord, piano, electro-acoustic clavichord, etc.)
He often teaches various courses or master-classes and, working either solo or accompanied, he has managed to make fifty or so CDs. He is also keeping an eye on the organisation of the current full concert cycle of J.S. Bach’s cantatas at the Temple du Foyer de l’Âme in Paris.