La Palatine: Baroque with a Rebel Spirit

Far from the dusty image Baroque music can sometimes have, Marie Théoleyre and Guillaume Haldenwang, co-founders since 2019 of the ensemble La Palatine, want to cleanse listeners’ ears, dust off the scores, and bring Baroque music to life in shows brimming with colour. Portrait of a Baroque ensemble with a rebel streak.

Baroque Childhoods

Marie Théoleyre began music with piano and horn. “I did it… far too long,” she admits, laughing. At ten, she joined the Franche-Comté children’s choir, then pursued a TMD baccalaureate (Techniques of Music and Dance) before entering the Amsterdam Conservatory. Even in her kindergarten report cards, it was written that “Marie will be an opera singer”: “My parents had a subscription to the Bastille Opera, and I always wanted to be a singer.” After a period of uncertainty, she trained in Geneva, then at the CRR (Conservatoire à rayonnement régional) in Paris, where she discovered Baroque music. It was also there she met Guillaume: “I grabbed him in a hallway for a masterclass.” 

Guillaume Haldenwang, for his part, began harpsichord at the Niort Conservatory (Poitou). “I was obsessed with Louis XIV. Apparently, I still am,” he adds. At eleven, he took up piano: “I wanted to be a dance accompanist, then an accompanist in general.” After moving away from Baroque music, he eventually returned to harpsichord, studying at the CRR in Paris. Far removed from the medical world in which he grew up, he was drawn instead to dance and the visual arts: “My parents quickly understood I wouldn’t become a doctor—I was far too bad at it!”

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