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
Émilie Planche began playing the violin when she was six years old, at the Conservatoire du 14ème Arrondissement de Paris. On her teacher’s advice, at the same time she took Jean Lenert’s classes at the Schola Cantorum. She then went to the CRR de Paris joining Bertrand Cervera’s class, where she was awarded her D.E.M. in 2014 with the judges’ congratulations. That same year, she appeared as a soloist at the Grand Amphithéâtre de La Sorbonne with the Orchestre du Lycée Henri IV.
In 2016, she was accepted at the Haute École de Musique in Geneva, in Marie-Annick Nicolas’s class where she learned about Baroque violin with Florence Malgoire and was then admitted as an academy member to the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. She then decided to continue with training in both modern and Baroque violin and to enter the two competitions at the CNSM de Paris, where, by the judges’ unanimous decision, she was admitted to Stéphanie-Marie Degand’s and François Fernandez’s classes. In 2024 she was awarded her Master’s in Baroque violin with the judges unanimously awarding her excellent marks. She is currently continuing her education in the final year of a Master’s in modern violin at the CNSMDP.
She has also had opportunities to learn more at Master classes with great teachers such as Albert and Alexander Markov, Florin Szigeti, Patrice Fontanarosa and Jean-Marc Philips-Varjabédian. Émilie Planche regularly performs in chamber music ensembles and takes part in many orchestra; concerts both in France and abroad.
Julianna David is a Baroque and modern cellist with a varied musical career and is also an Early Music enthusiast. After training with Elena Andreyev at the CRR de Paris, in 2024 she was awarded her Master’s in Baroque cello at the CNSMD de Paris, where she was taught by Christophe Coin and Bruno Cocs, and obtained excellent marks. She also holds a degree with excellent marks from the Hochschule für Musik Stuttgart, where she studied with Conradin Brotbek.
She has performed with high-prestige ensembles such as Le Concert Spirituel, Les Paladins, Ensemble La Fenice, Le Palais Royal and the Amman Chamber Orchestra. She has also appeared as a soloist with the David Zenekar orchestra in Hungary and as a member of the Amberger Sinfoniker in Germany.
She added to her orchestral experience as a member of the Freiburg Philharmonic Opera academy. She won the Jugendmusiziert competition and also works in education, she is currently teaching the cello at the Conservatoire de Marly-le-Roi. At the same time as her musical career, Julianna studied graphic design in Paris from 2017 to 2020. As she is always seeking to improve her skills, she has taken part in many master classes with well-known cellists such as Reinhard Latzko, Claudio Bohórquez and Gustav Rivinius. She has also worked with famous conductors such as Mariss Jansons.
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.