About
Cécile Chartrain
Hailing from Brittany (France), Cécile Chartrain developed a deep sensitivity to historical instruments from an early age. Her training took her to Europe’s foremost musical institutions: the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMD), where she studied historical oboe, harpsichord and basso continuo. Drawn to the intimate dialogue between voice and continuo, she also specialised in vocal accompaniment, earning a diploma from Stéphane Fuget’s baroque vocal coaching class. Her musical path was further enriched by inspiring encounters with musicians such as Pierre Hantaï, Bertrand Cuiller and Laurent Stewart.
In 2018 and 2019, Cécile is a prizewinner from the Vlaamse vereniging harpsichord competition and the Concours international d’ensembles de musique ancienne de Lausanne with her ensemble La Chicane. She performs as a soloist and alongside celebrated ensembles and conductors (Netherlands Bach Society, Opéra Royal de Versailles or Le Concert Spirituel) and has graced the stages of festivals and venues worldwide: the Oudemuziek Festival Utrecht, MA Brugge, the Innsbruck Festwochen der Alten Musik, the Enesco Festival in Bucharest, the Internationale Händel Festspiele Göttingen, Bangkok’s International Festival of Dance and Music, the Rijksmuseum, the Muziekgebouw, the Lotte Concert Hall (South Korea), the Guangzhou Opera House (China), the Château de Versailles, the Salle Cortot…
In 2022, she co-founded Marilou with Gabrielle Rubio, Samuel Bricault, Agnès Boissonnot-Guilbault and Hélène Richaud: a collective of multi-instrumentalists united by a shared passion for exploration. Through inventive arrangements and original transcriptions, the ensemble reimagines a wide-ranging repertoire for two to five instruments. Marilou performs regularly across France (at festivals such as La Folle Journée de Nantes, Bach en Combrailles and the Festival Baroque de Pontoise) as well as abroad, in Albacete (Spain), Brussels (Belgium), Utrecht (the Netherlands) and beyond. Their debut album, Doux Silence, was released in February 2024, and the ensemble is currently artists-in-residence at the Fondation Singer-Polignac.
Discography
Doux Silence
Between court arias, sonatas and cantatas, you will accompany in this programme the ups and downs of a shepherdess sighing in the woods, sometimes courted, soon abandoned. Seduced by freedom and caught up in her feelings...
Un Italien à Paris
Spring 1733: Giovanni Battista
Somis embarks on a long journey
from Turin, his hometown,
to Paris, where he performs
with the famous Concert Spirituel
at the Tuileries Palace, achieving
great success.
Le Quattro Stagioni
Vivaldi was already a renowned opera composer in Venice and throughout Italy, but he gained exceptional notoriety throughout Europe when the concerti constituting his Quattro Stagioni were published in Amsterdam.
Dis-moi Vénus
Venus, goddess of sensuality and great orchestrator of pleasures, pulls the strings of opera characters as if they were puppets in the land of Tendre. With great delectation, Marie Perbost invokes the goddess and the heroines of French opera from the century of Louis XV to embody all the victims of passions unleashed by Aphrodite.
Mozart - Pergolèse
These two masterpieces bound through style and history come to life with colourful plots: lightness, falsehoods and comical settings create delightfully bubbly situations for the tyrannical servant and naive shepherds, from which Pergolesi and Mozart derived the best musical effects.
The Crown
To mark the Coronation of King Charles III, we have brought together the most famous pieces of music from the coronations of James II in 1685 and George II in 1727. The masterpieces by Purcell and Handel display an extraordinarily evocative force: their “Grand Style” put a magnificent stamp on the Ceremonial of the Crown of England.