Centre de musique baroque de Versailles: the 40th-anniversary season

As it approaches its 40th anniversary in 2027, the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles opens a season that encapsulates what has made its model unique since 1987: bringing together research, publishing, training, artistic production and cultural outreach to keep the French repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries alive. More than a commemoration, the 2026–27 season aims to look to the future as much as to celebrate four decades of rediscovery.

Jean-Baptiste Lully will provide the season’s main thread, echoing the CMBV’s very first Grandes Journées, which were already devoted to him in 1987, the year marking the tercentenary of his death. Concerts, research and recordings will go hand in hand: Persée with Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel, Roland with I Gemelli, and La Grotte de Versailles, to be performed at the Chapelle Royale on 29 April. A collective volume devoted to performance and staging practices in Lully’s operas under Louis XIV will also build on several years of research into performing forces, the orchestra, declamation and the conditions in which these works were originally staged.

Another major development is the Studio baroque, a new two-year training and professional development programme for 18 young singers, instrumentalists and répétiteurs. Following auditions in September, its first sessions will begin in January 2027, focusing on historically informed performance, source study, declamation, gesture and Baroque theatre. Training will also continue through the Maîtrise: Paul Agnew will be conductor in residence with the Pages and Chantres for the 2026–27 season, alongside Fabien Armengaud.

The anniversary season will also look towards research and public engagement. As the monumental edition of Henry Du Mont’s works, begun by the CMBV in 1992, reaches completion, a new long-term editorial project devoted to Michel-Richard de Lalande, who died three hundred years ago in 1726, is getting under way. The year 2027 will also mark ten years of the Centre’s cultural outreach programme. Concerts, Jeudis musicaux, publications, conferences, training schemes and educational projects will thus make up a season conceived less as a retrospective than as the starting point for the next forty years.

Officiel website: www.cmbv.fr