Overview

A guest of the most prestigious institutions in France and abroad since its creation in 2005, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie performs at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Opéra Garnier, and the Opéra Comique, and at international festivals (Festival d’art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence, Festival international d’opéra baroque de Beaune, BBC Proms). It appears across Europe, at La Fenice (Venice), Bozar (Brussels), the Barbican Centre (London), the Musikfest Bremen, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Cologne Philharmonie, and the Dortmund Konzerthaus. The musicians of Le Cercle de l’Harmonie were trained in the leading conservatoires dedicated to performance on period instruments, such as those of The Hague, Basel, and Paris. They are for the most part heirs to the performing revolution initiated in the middle of the twentieth century by the great theorists Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt. Le Cercle de l’Harmonie also welcomes musicians from all backgrounds, representative of a recent shift affecting the musical world, trained in modern techniques and convinced of the necessity of using period instruments to defend a certain type of repertory, that championed by Le Cercle de l’Harmonie. Alongside the greatest masterpieces of Mozart and Haydn, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie has devoted itself to the French repertory, and particularly that of the pivotal era stretching from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, from Gluck to Wagner by way of Berlioz. In November and December 2018, Rhorer returns to Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to conduct Le Cercle de l’Harmonie in a groundbreaking new production of Verdi’s La traviata directed by Deborah Warner and using Verdi’s original 432 Hz tuning. In novembre 2018, le Cercle de l’Harmonie is in residence for three years at the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Aix-en-Provence.