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Claiming a substantial repertoire of early music that reflects its Southern European heritage, Cappella Mediterranea specializes in Latin music of the Baroque era. The ensemble was formed in 2005 by Argentinian conductor Leonardo Garcia Alarcón, with the purpose of pursuing the aesthetics and practices of the 16th through 18th centuries. The group focuses on musicological research into connections between Southern European Baroque music and the folk music of South America, and explores the influences of southern composers on their northern counterparts. Cappella Mediterranea has concentrated on madrigals, motets, instrumental music, and operas, and has revived many neglected works. Michelangelo Falvetti's Il Diluvio Universale was successfully produced at the Ambronay Festival in 2010, and Francesco Cavalli's Eliogabalo was another achievement for the group, who performed it in 2016 at the National Opera of Paris, and in 2017 at the Festival of Aix-en-Provence, the Royal Opéra of Versailles, and the Grand Théâtre of Geneva. The group has also promoted the less familiar works of Barbara Strozzi, Giovanni Giorgi, Giuseppe Zamponi, Mateo Romero, Carolus Hacquart, and Jacques Arcadelt. Cappella Mediterranea was supported by the Orange Foundation from 2009 to 2014, and the group began a residency at the Dijon Opera in 2018. The ensemble has recorded for several labels, including Ricercar, Ambronay, Naïve, and Alpha. ~ Blair Sanderson

Conductor, keyboard soloist, and continuo player Leonardo García Alarcón specializes in opera and the vocal and choral music of the Baroque, particularly unfamiliar repertoire. A pioneer in Baroque music performance in his native South America, García Alarcón is also active as a performer and educator in several European countries, with a large repertory covering music of various kinds.

García Alarcón was born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1976. Something of a child prodigy, he began giving concerts on the piano at age six. He joined the La Plata ensemble Toccata Instrumentale, and there, at 15, he began to study the art of realizing the continuo, the sequence of harmonies often played by a harpsichord in Baroque music. García Alarcón attended the National University of La Plata, studying conducting, and went on to the Catholic University of Buenos Aires. His interest in Baroque music was stimulated once again when he landed a continuo slot in the Ensemble Elyma, directed by historical performance pioneer Gabriel Garrido, and he became Garrido's assistant. He made his recording debut with that group in 2000, appearing on its album El maestro de baile y otros tonadillas. García Alarcón went to Switzerland to continue his education, taking courses at the Geneva Conservatory and the Centre de Musique Anciennes de Genève. In 1999, he formed the ensemble Cappella Mediterraneo in Geneva; he continues to serve as co-artistic director of the group.

As a recording artist, García Alarcón has been active variously as a conductor, keyboard soloist, and continuo player. In 2009, he conducted Belgium's Ensemble Clematis and has served as co-director of that group. The following year, he began directing the Choeur de Chambre de Namur. García Alarcón has guest conducted such major groups as the Freiburger Barockorchester and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. He is a noted musicological researcher who has investigated Latin American Baroque music and the music of the 17th century Portuguese court. His recordings often focus on little-known composers such as Matheo Romero, Giovanni Giorgi, and Michelangelo Falvetti, but he has also recorded Bach and Handel, mostly for the Ricercar and Ambronay labels. For the former, he recorded Handel's Salve Regina with the Millenium Orchestra in 2022. ~ James Manheim

Veronique Gens is generally considered among the most prominent sopranos on the opera and recital stages in the 21st century. She became associated with Baroque repertory early in her career but soon branched out into the operas of Mozart and later into works by Berlioz, Fauré, and Poulenc. Gens issued the ambitious program Nuits on Alpha in 2020.

Gens was born in Orléans, France, on April 19, 1966, into a family with mainly medical backgrounds (her father was a prominent doctor). She began singing in a choir as a child but, choosing to study English, planned to become an interpreter. In her teens, however, she shifted her focus to music and went on to win first prize for early music at the Paris Conservatory. Conductor William Christie introduced her to the Baroque repertory, and in 1986, she scored her first success with him when she appeared with Les Arts Florissants under his direction.

Gens' 1994 portrayal of the Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro received wide acclaim and catapulted her to international stardom. By this time, her recordings of The Fairy-Queen and Rameau's Castor et Pollux, made several years earlier, had also garnered positive notice. Easily among her most notable recordings was the René Jacobs-led 1999 release of Così fan tutte on Harmonia Mundi. In 2001, Virgin Classics released her rendition of the Berlioz song cycle Les nuits d'été, with the Orchestre de l'Opéra national de Lyon led by Louis Langrée. In 2004, she appeared in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

Gens has personally stated a preference for Mozart and, besides singing the Countess and Fiordiligi, has sung Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni) and Vitellia (La Clemenza di Tito). She considers Mozart the perfect bridge for her other favorites, Baroque repertory and French music from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gens has sung with some of the most important European conductors throughout her career, including Claudio Abbado, Philippe Herreweghe, and Marc Minkowski. Besides Harmonia Mundi and Virgin Classics, Gens has recorded for L'Oiseau-Lyre, Erato, and Archiv. In 2006, Gens made the first of her Tragediennes solo recordings, with a third volume released in 2011.

Gens has continued to record Baroque repertoire in the 2010s, taking the leading role in a recording of Rameau's "ballet heroïque" Les fêtes de Polymnie in 2015. Much of her output during this period, however, has consisted of weightier French roles of the 19th century, including works by Berlioz, Gounod, and Saint-Saëns. Not content with big-production starring roles, Gens made several recordings of rare operas for the Ediciones Singulares label. In 2015, she made her first recording for the Alpha label: Néère, a collection of French art songs, was met with acclaim. Gens released Visions, a collection of ambitious and often obscure French arias and cantatas on a shifting border between sacred and profane that only she could have navigated in 2017. The French government has conferred upon Gens the honors of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and Chevalier of Arts and Letters. In 2020, Gens issued the solo album Nuits and was heard in starring roles on recordings of Lully's Armide and Offenbach's Maître Péronilla. ~ Robert Cummings & James Manheim

Soprano Gwendoline Blondeel specializes in Baroque music and has appeared several times with conductor William Christie. Her repertory is varied, however, stretching forward into the 20th century with French, Italian, Russian, and Swiss works. Blondeel's recording career began in 2019 and has grown substantially in the early 2020s. She appeared with Christie on his album Bill & Friends in 2024, and that year, she was also heard on the Château de Versailles label on a recording of Mondonville's Le Carnaval du Parnasse.

Blondeel was born in 1995 in Belgium. She grew up in a musical family and sang from the time she was a young girl. As a teenager, she sang in the youth choir of La Monnaie opera house in Brussels. She planned to attend law school but dropped out after four months. At the same time, her former choir director contacted her and asked her to sing in a production of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice at La Monnaie. Blondeel took that as a sign and enrolled for vocal studies at the Institut Royal Supérieur de Musique et de Pédagogie in Namur, Belgium. She went on for further study at the Académie du Théâtre de La Monnaie and then joined the Youth Ensemble of the Grand Théâtre de Genève in Switzerland. The year 2019 was an important one for Blondeel, who won first prize at the Froville International Baroque Singing Competition in France; she released her debut album, O splendida dies, with the group Scherzi Musicali on the Ricercar label.

She had a breakthrough in 2021 when she appeared in the title role of Aurore in the opera Titon det l'Aurore by Jean-Joseph de Mondonville at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The production was directed by veteran conductor William Christie, and Blondeel has continued to work with him frequently, appearing under his baton at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and other places. Meanwhile, she has also sung under various leading conductors, most but not all in the Baroque field; these include Leonardo García Alarcón (multiple Baroque works), Diego Fasolis, and Kazushi Ono (in Arthur Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher). Blondeel's recording career has been on a sharp upward trajectory. She appeared on two albums in 2022, three in 2023, and no fewer than eight in 2024. One of those was Bill & Friends, a Christie album on which he gathered many of the younger musicians he had influenced. ~ James Manheim

The high tenor Cyrille Dubois has performed an unusually wide variety of roles, ascending early in his career to appearances at La Scala, the Paris Opera, and other top houses. He has recorded for Aparte and other labels.

Dubois was born in Ouistreham on the Normandy coast on September 27, 1984. By the time he was six, he was already singing in a municipal choir there, and the following year, he joined the children's choir, the Maîtrise de Caen. He made rapid progress as a singer, mastering English and appearing in a production of Britten's The Turn of the Screw at the Opéra de Lyon at age 12. He took a break from singing after his voice changed and contemplated a scientific career, but he returned to music and enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris, studying with Alain Buet. After finishing his studies, he joined the Lyric Workshop at the Paris Opera and began to find major roles there: Sam Kaplan in Kurt Weill's Street Scene in 2010 and Goncalves in Ravel's one-act opera L'heure espagnole the following year. In 2012, Dubois made his debut at Italy's La Scala, in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann.

Soon, he was appearing in other major houses, including the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 2013, playing Count Almaviva in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia. He sang in a new production of Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann at the Opéra de Lyon in 2014. He reprised the Ravel work at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2015. In the late 2010s, Dubois appeared in Mozart operas at a variety of venues, including Così fan tutte at the Paris Opera in 2017; he also appeared in Auber's opera Le Domino Noir at the Liège Opera that year. Dubois has also performed recitals with pianist Tristan Raës as Duo Contraste; the pair won prizes at the Lili and Nadia Boulanger Competition and the Lyon Chamber Music Competition and has appeared at Wigmore Hall in London.

Dubois has been heard on several recordings, including three opera albums in 2018 alone: a performance of Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles, conductor Hervé Niquet's production of Fromental Halévy's La reine de Chypre, and conductor Christophe Rousset's revival of Antonio Salieri's almost unknown Les Horaces. Dubois has issued several solo albums on the Aparte label, including Liszt: O lieb! in 2019 and Lili et Nadia Boulanger: Mélodies in 2020. His appearances in 2021 included one as Tamino in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, K. 620, at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. Dubois and Raës issued a complete recording of Fauré's songs in 2022, winning a Gramophone Classical Music Award. Dubois joined Baroque keyboardist Christophe Rousset in 2023 on the album François Couperin: The Sphere of Intimacy; in the same year, he issued So Romantique!, a French aria collaboration with the Orchestre National de Lille. He released several more albums in 2023, including Jouissons de nos beaux ans! with the Baroque-specialist Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir; that album exploited the haute-contre quality of Dubois' voice, approaching a countertenor sound. In 2024, Dubois was featured on an Alpha recording of Charpentier's Médée under the direction of Hervé Niquet. ~ James Manheim

Belgium's Choeur de Chambre de Namur ("Namur Chamber Choir") has a large repertory of choral standards but has focused especially on historical performances of early music. The group has a large repertory of recordings, many of them made for the Ricercar label.

The Choeur de Chambre de Namur was founded in 1987 in Namur, Belgium, by the Center for Choral Singing of the Communauté française de Belgique ("French Community of Belgium"). The group receives some government funding but has been successful in drawing audiences and generating album sales almost from the beginning. For a time, the choir favored music from Belgium's Wallonia region, such as Orlande de Lassus and André Grétry, but soon, its repertory broadened. The choir's size varies from 12 to 32 singers, according to the requirements of the music being performed. The Choeur de Chambre de Namur has always welcomed guest conductors, including such leading lights of the historical performance movement as Christophe Rousset, Jordi Savall, and Marc Minkowski. In its first years, the group has a sequence of conductors that included Pierre Cao, Denis Menier, Olivier Opdebeek, and Patrick Davin. In 2002, Jean Tubéry became conductor; he was succeeded in 2010 by Leonardo García Alarcón. In 1993, the Choeur de Chambre de Namur made its recording debut, joining the instrumental group La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy for a performance of Handel's Messiah on the Astrée label. In the late '90s, the group made several recordings on the Cypres label, including one of Paul Uy's Choral pour la Paix in 1996. Although the choir is oriented toward Baroque music, it has a large repertory extending forward to the contemporary era. In 2000, the group made a critically acclaimed recording of Benoît Mernier's Missa Christi Regis Genitum.

The Choeur de Chambre de Namur has collaborated with leading early music instrumental ensembles, including Les Agrémens, La Petite Bande, and the Ricercar Consort. The group is closely associated with the ensemble Les Agrémens. It has also appeared with prominent modern-instrument groups such as the Royal Flanders Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de Lille, and the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège. In 2003, with In dulci jubilo... Deutsche Barock Weinacht, the choir made its first recording for the Ricercar label. It has remained associated with that label, although it has also recorded for Ambronay, Alpha, and Aparte, among other labels. By 2023, when the Choeur de Chambre de Namur released an album on Alpha featuring Mozart's Requiem in D minor, K. 626, and Giovanni Paisiello's Mass for the Coronation of Napoleon, the group's recording catalog comprised some 50 items. ~ James Manheim