Ghislaine Demonceau

Ghislaine Demonceau (also Ghislaine de Monceau ; born November 13, 1921 in Calais ; † June 21, 2014 in Argenteuil ) was a French violinist of Belgian descent.

Demonceau belonged to a family of musicians of Belgian origin. Her father Maurice Demonceau was a singer, her mother, the actress Anna Demonceau-Vigneron , had studied at the Verviers Conservatory, her sister Gisèle de Monceau was a pianist and cellist and her sister Sybille Demonceau was a pianist and harpist.

Already at the end of the 1920s she and her sisters appeared as musical "child prodigies". In 1931 she was a prizewinner at the Concours Léopold Bellan and then studied violin with Marcel Chailley at the Conservatoire Musica , directed by Meyrianne Héglon-Leroux and Georges de Lausnay . At the Paris Conservatory she continued her studies with Ginette Neveu , Janine Andrade , Lola Bobesco , Christian Ferras , Michel Schwalbé , Ivry Gitlis , Devy Erlih and Serge Blanc . In 1936 she won the Prix ​​Deru in Verviers . Her participation in tours of the Caisse Nationale Autonome de la Musique (CNAM) founded by Auguste Mangeot in 1938 made her known as a violinist in France before the Second World War.

After the war she became a violinist in the orchestra of Radio Belgium, but continued to perform regularly as a soloist in France. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she played at the Grands concerts spirituel de musique vocale et instrumentale, founded by Abbé Jean Fabing in Amilis, with musicians such as Antoinette Labye (soprano), Michèle Bertin (alto), Georges Lacour (tenor) and Bernard Demigny (Baritone), Jean Hoffmann (bass), Jacques Edé (oboe), Lucienne Guerra (violin), Annette Queille (viola), Gisèle de Monceau (cello) and Joachim Havard de la Montagne (organ) Works by Heinrich Schütz , Johann Sebastian Bach , Georg Friedrich Händel , Henri Dumont , Marc Antoine Charpentier , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Michel-Richard Delalande , Tomaso Albinoni , Jean-Philippe Rameau , Joachim Havard de la Montagne, Giuseppe Torelli , Christoph Graupner , Jean-Marie Leclair and Dietrich Buxtehude . She also performed with her sisters as Trio de Monceau in the 1950s .

After the accidental death of her sister Sybille, she devoted herself increasingly to teaching in the 1960s. For some time she worked as a tutor for André Asselin at the Paris Conservatory and gave private lessons until 2012. She also performed with the Pasdeloup Concerts orchestra . She worked many times with the choir and instrumental ensemble of La Madeleine , with which recordings of Charles Gounod's Requiem and the Complies and Office de Prime by Havard de la Montagne were made. Both were awarded a Grand Prix National du Disque Lyrique .

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• Musica et Memoria - Obituaire - Ghislaine Demonceau