A mythical opera of the baroque revival in the 1980s, Lully’s Atys returns in 2026 in a radically new version, the result of four years of work by the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles. Notably, it completely reorganizes the orchestra. Benoît Dratwicki, the centre’s artistic director, tells us the story of this adventure.
For the 14th time, Europe’s musical world gathers in January at the Valletta Baroque Festival in Malta. Rarely-performed works, musicians from every country, a highly international audience. A notable event this year: the city, founded in 1565 by the French knight Jean de La Valette, is hosting a fully staged opera, Pelopida, by the Maltese composer Girolamo Abos.
In Lyon, Franck-Emmanuel Comte and his ensemble Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu explore original paths between early music and other artistic disciplines. A meeting with a conductor whose motto is: explore, reveal, share.
The recording of The Four Seasons by Amandine Beyer and her ensemble Gli Incogniti (released in 2008) is among the benchmark interpretations of Vivaldi’s work. For the violinist, this recording was anything but a closed chapter in a “sound museum”: it was a sensory shock, a door opening onto the unknown and, more recently, a choreographed playground.
Fabio Biondi does not play Vivaldi: he makes Vivaldi speak through the violin. Between traditional Italian virtuosity and the finely crafted grammar of Baroque research, he has spent nearly fifty years defending the idea that music is a language rather than a mere question of tonality. We look back on a seminal encounter and his album of The Four Seasons, which went on to achieve international success.
In a bend of the Danube, 80 km from Vienna, Melk Abbey (Austria) hosts a Baroque music festival every year at Pentecost, set against an enchanting backdrop. Artistic director and tenor Michael Schade has just unveiled the 2026 edition.
Founded in 1980, the Ricercar label celebrates forty-five years of existence with quiet discretion. An opportunity to take stock with founder Jérôme Lejeune about the complicated economics of the CD, and its indispensable role as both a tool of memory and a musicological act.
At the helm of Cappella Mediterranea, Argentine conductor Leonardo García-Alarcón brings friends and partners into a sweeping saga that links libraries and stages, South America and Baroque Europe, record and video. And he insists: early music doesn’t exist. The moment it is performed, it becomes alive!
Medieval and Renaissance music are rarely heard in Berlin—a city otherwise bursting with musical richness. Singer Sarah Fuhs and flutist Amanda Markrwick, with their ensemble Titan’s Rising, are trying, along with a few others, to change this situation.
