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Cellist Ophélie Gaillard is a versatile player who is familiar in the worlds of Baroque music, traditional repertory, and contemporary works. She is the founder of two small historical performance ensembles and has been active as a teacher for many years.

Gaillard was born on June 13, 1974, in Paris. Her versatility as a cellist began to show itself during her education; she attended the Conservatoire de Paris, studying modern cello with Philippe Muller, chamber music with oboist Maurice Bourgue, and Baroque cello with Christophe Coin. She earned the conservatory's first prizes in all three fields. Gaillard also earned degrees in music teaching and musicology from the Sorbonne University. She has mostly been active as a chamber music player. In 1994, she founded Ensemble Amarillis with her sister, recorder player and oboist Héloïse Gaillard, and harpsichordist Violaine Cochard. Gaillard took third prize at the International Johann Sebastian Bach Cello Competition in Leipzig in 1998 and got a solo instrumentalist of the year nod at the Victoires de la musique classiques competition in France in 2003. In 2001, Gaillard made her recording debut on the Ambroisie label with an album of works by Britten. She performed with Baroque groups led by Christophe Rousset, Emmanuelle Haïm, and John Eliot Gardiner, and in 2005, she created the Pulcinella Ensemble, with which Gaillard remains associated. The group recorded the complete sonatas for cello and continuo of Vivaldi the following year on Ambroisie. Pulcinella Ensemble was renamed the Pulcinella Orchestra in 2013 and continues to perform.

Gaillard has performed and recorded an exceptionally wide variety of music that includes many Baroque chamber works, accordion-and-cello duo music (with accordionist Pascal Contet), Romantic repertory, and contemporary music. Most of her recordings have been of chamber music, but she recorded the cello-and-orchestra recital Dreams with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2010. Gaillard uses different cellos for her work in Baroque music (a 1737 Francesco Goffriller that was stolen from Gaillard at knifepoint in 2018 but then anonymously returned) and later repertory (an 1855 Bernardel instrument). She often performs with dancers and mimes.

As a recitalist and chamber player, Gaillard has appeared in England, Morocco, the U.S., Japan, and Latin America. Since 2003, when she began teaching at the Conservatoire de Musique et de Danse à Rayonnement Départemental in Aulnay-sous-Bois, France, she has had an important career as an educator. She has been a guest faculty member annually at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and in 2014, she joined the faculty of the Haute École de la Musique Genève in Switzerland. Gaillard has continued to record, by 2022 issuing some 30 albums on Ambroisie and later Aparte. That year, she led Pulcinella on the album A Night in London with soprano Sandrine Piau and mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot. ~ James Manheim

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) has held a prominent place in British music-making for more than seven decades. With a wide reach across Britain, in addition to its regular concerts in London's Cadogan Hall, including concerts in places where access to orchestral music is limited, the RPO can lay claim to the title of Britain's national orchestra. The RPO incorporates the pops-oriented Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, the avant-garde Sharp Edge group, and RPO Resound, a community and educational outreach program.

The RPO's broad contemporary appeal, which has included appearances with popular music stars and on film, television, and video game soundtracks, would have been lauded by its founder and first conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, who set up the RPO in 1946 and helped lead a vital revival in the U.K.'s orchestral life after World War II. The new orchestra prospered, beginning a long summer residency at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1948 and touring the U.S. in 1950, becoming the first English orchestra to do so since 1912. Rudolf Kempe became principal conductor upon Beecham's death in 1961. The orchestra hit a rough patch in the early '60s under the leadership of Beecham's widow; Kempe departed (and then returned), and the orchestra temporarily lost the right to use the "royal" designation. That was restored by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966, and several strong conductors, Antal Doráti (1975-1978), André Previn (1985-1992), and Vladimir Ashkenazy (music director, 1987-1994), built the orchestra artistically. Later conductors have included Daniele Gatti, Yuri Temirkanov, Charles Dutoit, and Vasily Petrenko, who began his tenure as music director in 2021.

The RPO is especially notable for the depth and variety of its recording program, which in the first few years of its existence had already topped 100 items; by the early 2020s decade, the orchestra had issued many hundreds of recordings, stretching from pop (disco enthusiasts will remember it as the orchestra featured on the Hooked on Classics recordings of the 1980s) to new avant-garde music. Among these was a 125-album contract with the Tring label. The orchestra's RPO Records, formed in 1986, is thought to have been the first recording label owned by a symphony orchestra; such an arrangement is now commonplace. The following year, the RPO launched the light music (or pops in the U.S.) companion group, the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.

In 1993, the RPO inaugurated an educational and community outreach program titled RPO Resound. This program provides musical experiences outside of traditional concert settings, such as schools, prisons, and hospitals. Among the key projects for this program is the stroke rehabilitation project STROKESTRA. The RPO is the resident music ensemble of Cadogan Hall in Chelsea, becoming the first London orchestra to have a permanent home, giving its first concert there in 2004. In 2019, the RPO released Animal Requiem by rocker Pete Townshend's collaborator and marital partner, Rachel Fuller. That year, the RPO was named the associate orchestra of the Royal Albert Hall. Among the orchestra's 2022 albums are a recording of two Sibelius Symphonies and Air, featuring the music of Oliver Davis. The next year, they teamed with Joe Hisaishi for A Symphonic Celebration, which reimagined songs from beloved Studio Ghibli animated films. ~ James Manheim & Keith Finke