Lucile Boulanger: “The viol is by no means a museum piece”

Crowned Instrumental Soloist of the Year at the 2025 Victoires de la Musique Classique [the French equivalent to the Grammy Awards and the Brit Awards for music], French gamba player Lucile Boulanger champions an early music that is alive, transmitted through gesture, listening, and instinct as much as through scores. This conviction runs throughout her career, from her childhood love at first sight with the viola da gamba to her collaborations with electronic music, dance, and some of the leading figures of the Baroque world. She will perform in Arras on June 9 alongside Justin Taylor, before joining the German festival Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci for the concert Under the Sun of Versailles on June 14, the first stop on a busy European summer tour.

Awarded the 2025 Victoires de la Musique Classique prize in the “Instrumental Soloist” category, French musician Lucile Boulanger has established herself as one of the leading performers on the viola da gamba today. First trained by Christine Plubeau, in an approach to the instrument rooted in listening, imitation, and gesture before music theory, she later continued her studies with Ariane Maurette, Jérôme Hantaï, and Christophe Coin at the Paris Conservatoire (CNSMD). Between a commitment to the Baroque and a penchant for exploration, a few recent milestones illustrate the diversity of her approach: Bach sonatas with Pierre Hantaï at the Salle Cortot last January, electro-Baroque at the Théâtre du Châtelet with Calling Marian in May, and her upcoming participation in Les Chemins de Bach (“Bach’s Footsteps”) with the ensemble Pygmalion in the summer of 2026. With La Messagère (“The Messenger”), released by Alpha Classics in 2024, she continues this tradition by creating a dialogue between the viola da gamba of the 17th and 21st centuries. Appointed professor of viola da gamba at the Paris Conservatoire for the start of the 2025 academic year, after teaching for several years at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, she reflects here on her life as an instrumentalist, teacher, and former actress, guided by a single conviction: early music is not preserved under glass, and it is transmitted as much through gesture and listening as through musical language.

Speaking with Lucile Boulanger, one quickly understands that what interests her is not artificially modernizing early music, but reminding people that it is alive. When asked about dusting off the Baroque repertoire, she immediately replies: “The dust is more in the eyes of certain listeners.” For children discovering the viola today, the instrument is by no means a museum piece. “When a child takes up the viol, it is never because they find it dusty,” says the mother of a young child, impatiently eager to pass on her love of Baroque music to her son.

She seeks and finds this vitality in her most recent projects: collaborations with electronic music, such as the electro-Baroque concert at the Châtelet at the beginning of May alongside electronic musician Calling Marian, performances combining hip-hop dance and early music—the show Phénix, choreographed by Mourad Merzouki, left a lasting mark—and other contemporary creations. Not in order to leave the Baroque world behind, but to continue moving freely within it. “It makes me rework essential things: pulse, dance, the relationship to rhythm.” Yet her need to push boundaries does not prevent her from performing alongside the greatest artists in more traditional projects: making Bach resonate with Pierre Hantaï or with the ensemble Pygmalion, directed by Raphaël Pichon. And perhaps that is, ultimately, the true thread running through her career: transmitting a demanding practice without ever confining it. Keeping alive, within the institutions she now joins as a professor, something of the instinctive gesture of the four-year-old child who one day simply loved hearing the sound of the viola da gamba.