Alice Foccroulle & Pierre Gallon
Biographie Alice Foccroulle & Pierre Gallon
Alice Foccroulle
Belgian soprano Alice Foccroulle was born in 1985 in Brussels and already at a very young age began to show an acute interest in music. Aged 7 she first joined the Childrens’ Choir at the Brussels Opera House, La Monnaie.
She studied two years History of Art and Musicology at Brussels University, following which, Alice graduated in 2011 at the Musikhochschule Köln with Christoph Prégardien.
Her interest in Baroque music led her to work with leading specialist ensembles. Alice is a featured soloist in the work of Belgian ensemble In Alto. In 2015, she took part in the debut CD recording of In Alto, dedicated to J.H. Schein for the label Ramée. In 2016 their recording Schütz and his legacy (Passacaille) was very well received by the critics. It won several prizes such as Choc Classica and Diapason d’Or de l’Année, as well as being selected for features in newspapers Le monde and Libération. In 2019, InAlto received a seconds Diapason d’Or for their recording, Teatro Spirituale (Ricercar), dedicated to the roman music at the beginning of the 17th century.
Alongside this, Alice has performed and recorded with specialists such as Collegium Vocale Gent (Philippe Herreweghe), Pygmalion (Raphaël Pichon), La Fenice (Jean Tubéry), Utopia and B’Rock, and gives recitals with harpsichordist Pierre Gallon, cornettist Lambert Colson, organist Bernard Foccroulle.
She is also very much attracted to contempory music. Notable productions have included Kris Defoort’s international opera’s creation, House of Sleeping Beauties at la Monnaie.
In September 2017 she sang in Bernard Foccroulle’s E vidi quattro stelle in Bozar, which was later recorded for the lable Outhere in 2019.
Pierre Gallon
grew up in a home that was overflwing with instruments of all kinds, offering him a limitless playground. When he was ten, he realised that the harpsichord offered the best way of expressing himself. Bibiane Lapointe and Thierry Maeder took him to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and its Early Music classes taught by Olivier Baumont and Blandine Rannou. He left in 2010 with two first prizes and the highest honors. Meetings with people such as Blandine Verlet, Elisabeth Joyé and Pierre Hantaï while he was studying were aesthetic epiphanies and deeply affected his approach to the instrument.
Pierre Gallon sees music as a primarily collective adventure – and as a result, even today, he involves himself in his work with well-known ensembles such as Pygmalion (Raphaël Pichon), le Poème Harmonique (Vincent Dumestre), Correspondances (Sébastien Daucé), Inalto (Lambert Colson), Les Musiciens de Saint Julien (François Lazarevitch), and Le Caravansérail (Bertrand Cuiller).
Even so, the adventure takes him along equally captivating paths as Pierre explores the immense solo harpsichord repertoire, ranging from the Renaissance up to our own time.
In 2014, his first solo recording of works published by Pierre Attaingnant was unanimously acclaimed by critics. Pierre is often invited to play recitals at festivals such as La Roque d’Anthéron, the Académie Bach in Arques-la-Bataille, la Folle Journée in Nantes, the Abbaye de l’Epau festival, the Festival Poznan Baroque, at the Venitian Centre for Baroque Music and the Abbaye de Royaumont where he recorded a second CD celebrating Joseph Haydn’s music, released in 2018. His third solo recording was released earlier this year: it imagines the Parisian meeting between Louis Couperin and J.J. Froberger.
Pierre also enjoys working with other keyboard-playing friends ; he performs in a harpsichord duet with Bertrand Cuiller and, as a “band of harpsichords” with Yoann Moulin and Freddy Eichelberger. His regular music partners include violist Lucile Boulanger, lutenist Thomas Dunford, and soprano Alice Foccroulle.
