La Chapelle Royale

Philippe Herreweghe, founder of the French ensemble La Chapelle Royale

La Chapelle Royale is a French ensemble for baroque music .

history

La Chapelle Royale was founded in Paris in 1977 by the Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe . The ensemble consists of around 30 young French singers and an orchestra playing baroque instruments.

La Chapelle Royale takes its name from the Chapelle Royale , a musical institution that was attached to the palace chapel of the French kings. The facility consisted of a choir, organists and instrumentalists and was separate from the Musique du Chambre, which performed secular music.

The ensemble's original objective was to interpret the great French repertoire of the 17th century ( Henri Dumont , Jean-Baptiste Lully , Marc-Antoine Charpentier , André Campra , Jean Gilles , ...), but Herreweghe had more connected La Chapelle Royale since 1985 and more with his Belgian ensemble, the Collegium Vocale Gent , in a repertoire that is almost exclusively dedicated to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach .

Since its inception, La Chapelle Royale has taken part in major musical festivals such as the Festival van Vlaanderen , the Holland Festival , the Festival von Saintes , as well as festivals in Stuttgart , Ansbach , Wroclaw , Milan , Bologna , Turku , Lucerne , Salzburg , Linz and Bratislava . It also took part in numerous opera productions, such as Iphigénie en Tauride by Niccolò Piccinni in Paris, Les Indes galantes by Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1983 in Florence , L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi in 1985 at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence , Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell in 1992 at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and Armide by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1992 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris.

In addition to Philippe Herreweghe, the ensemble was also directed by Gustav Leonhardt , Peter Phillips , Michel Corboz , John Eliot Gardiner , Roy Goodman , Sigiswald Kuijken , Bernard Haitink and John Adams and has now produced more than 60 CDs for the Virgin Classics and Harmonia Mundi labels produced.

La Chapelle Royale is a member of the FEVIS (Federation of the Vocal Ensembles and Instrumental Specialized). In addition to La Chapelle Royale, Philippe Herreweghe also founded the Ensemble Vocal Européen de la Chapelle Royale .

meaning

La Chapelle Royale was in the 1980s, together with the music ensemble Les Arts Florissants , one of the pillars of the musical revolution known in France and Belgium under the name "Baroqueux" (see historical performance practice or performance on historical instruments) and in the 1970s by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt .

The ensemble has developed into one of the world's leading ensembles of French baroque music and has now expanded its repertoire from the Renaissance to the Classical and early Romantic periods.

Recordings