Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco

The ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco was founded in the spring of 2016 at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, on the initiative of Cecilia Bartoli and in collaboration with the company’s director Jean-Louis Grinda. The project received the immediate support of HSH Prince Albert II and HRH Princess Caroline of Hanover.

As the ensemble’s artistic director, Cecilia Bartoli has assembled some of the world’s finest musicians, playing on period instruments, to create an orchestra inspired by the musical traditions that flourished at Europe’s great courts in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central to Cecilia Bartoli’s artistic vision are the great masters of the Baroque period – such as Handel and Vivaldi – as well as the music of Rossini. She also researches and champions works that have never, or only rarely, been performed; through this she aims to arouse audiences’ curiosity. She is supported in this objective by an ensemble whose versatility and rich palette of tone colours are very different from those of a modern orchestra.

The inaugural concert of Les Musiciens du Prince on 8 July 2016 in the courtyard of the Palace of Monaco, in the presence of the Royal Family, was followed by their first European tour (to venues including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Bozar in Brussels and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg) with a programme primarily devoted to works by Handel.

Since then, Les Musiciens du Prince and Cecilia Bartoli have given many concerts annually throughout Europe. Their critically and publicly acclaimed performances have taken them to prestigious venues such as the Elbphilharmonie, the Opéra Royal de Versailles, the Luxembourg, Paris and Berlin Philharmonies, Munich’s Prinzregententheater, the Vienna Musikverein, the Graz Musikverein, the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

Regular performers at the Salzburg Festival, Les Musiciens du Prince have featured in staged productions of Ariodante (2017), Alcina (2019), Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (2021) and Il barbiere di Siviglia (2022), as well as in concert performances of La donna del lago (2017) and La clemenza di Tito (2021). In 2018 they appeared with Mexican tenor Javier Camarena in a programme of arias previously recorded for a CD produced by the Cecilia Bartoli Music Foundation and released by Decca. The same year the orchestra participated in mezzo-soprano Varduhi Abrahamyan’s debut recording Rhapsody, part of Decca Classics’s mentored by Bartoli series.

Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco are in residence at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.