Between a twenty-date tour in France of L’Avare (“The Miser”), an intermezzo on Molière’s famous play composed in 1720 by the Italian Francesco Gasparini, and preparations for the next edition of the Misteria Paschalia festival in Kraków, for which he serves as musical director for the 2024–2026 period, spring promises to be busy for Vincent Dumestre and his ensemble Le Poème Harmonique.
In the landscape of European Baroque ensembles, Accademia Bizantina and its director, Ottavio Dantone, stand out for their originality and their sense of communication. “The Exciting Sound of Baroque Music” is their motto, and their concerts are guided by the watchword “Liberate the music”! As for the Brandenburg Concertos, they are recording them on their own label, HDB Sonus, in a series entitled Baroque Anatomy.
The French ensemble Doulce Mémoire, specializing in Renaissance music, pays tribute to its founder Denis Raisin Dadre, who passed away last October, and opens a new chapter under the leadership of Elsa Frank and Jérémie Papasergio, long-standing collaborators of the founder. A concert at the Opéra de Tours on March 17 will mark both this tribute and the rebirth of the ensemble.
She has been the new artistic director of the Bruges Early Music Festival (Belgium) since January 1, and is the founder of the Sollazzo ensemble. She’s 38. While Bruges is embarking on a new chapter, Sollazzo is taking a decisive step forward with La Flamboyance, a medieval project for twenty musicians to be released on CD in May.
They are four: Roxana and Yaoré on violins, Suzanne on cello and Louise on harpsichord. Behind the Celtic myth of the “banshee”, they reinvent the concert experience with a freedom shaped as much by Baroque aesthetics as by the spirit of an Irish pub. Their album, to be released in September on Alpha Classics, will explore Venetian and Viennese repertoire.
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.
A veritable compilation of Lully’s “greatest hits”: Carnaval–Mascarade royale, his final comédie-ballet, has never been revived in its entirety since its creation in 1675. Federico Maria Sardelli and Samuele Lastrucci, from the Istituto Lulli in Florence, are presenting it in its first modern-era staged version at the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara.
It is an event: a complete recording of the 18 cantatas by Johann Ludwig Bach, cousin of the famous Johann Sebastian—cantatas that the latter himself copied out and performed in Leipzig in 1726, exactly 300 years ago. For the occasion, keyboardist and conductor Johanna Soller presents the first complete recording.
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.
Music director of the Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri and a tireless seeker of Baroque treasures, Giulio Prandi is the architect of a unique ecosystem in Pavia (Italy). He opens 2026 with the revival of Pelopida, an opera by the Franco-Maltese composer Girolamo Abos (1715–1760), at the Valletta Baroque Festival in Malta. Several ambitious projects will follow, from Neapolitan opera to sacred polyphonies, not to mention collaborations with the cultural institutions of his home city.
In an America where early music remains a scattered archipelago, the ensemble Blue Heron stands out like a beacon. Its founder, violinist and conductor Scott Metcalfe, has patiently woven a thread linking New England to old Europe. “We are isolated, yes—but free,” he says. For Total Baroque Magazine, he tells the story of how it all began… on a bus in Boston, in 1999!
