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.