Formed in 1998, Le Poème Harmonique is a group of soloists, gathered around its artistic director Vincent Dumestre. Its artistic activity, centered on vocal and instrumental music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, is regularly enriched by interaction with other disciplines.

Actors, dancers, circus artists, and puppeteers join Le Poème Harmonique’s singers and musicians in programs of chamber works (Le Ballet des Fées, Il Fasolo) and in large-scale stage productions, such as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (a comédie-ballet by Molière and Lully; stage director Benjamin Lazar) and Baroque Carnival (directed by Cécile Roussat). For operatic performances, such as Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione and Cavalli’s Egisto (both staged by Benjamin Lazar), Le Poème Harmonique studies in depth the correspondences between period aesthetics—using candles for lighting, authentic gestures, and painted sets and machinery—and the aesthetics of modern stage productions. The ensemble also gets back to the sources of early French and Italian music by exploring its relationships with traditional or folk music; their recording entitled Aux Marches du Palaisis is devoted to French songs of oral tradition.

Outstanding events of the past seasons include Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Baroque Carnival, and Cadmus et Hermione. The ensemble’s recent stage projects have included the first performances of Pagliardi’s Caligula, in September 2011 at the International Puppet Festival in Charleville-Mézières, and of Cavalli’s Egisto in February 2012 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, then at the Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie. Also, in 2013–2014 Le Poème Harmonique presented Purcell’s Dido and Æneas at Rouen Opéra. In 2014–2015, again with the Opéra-Comique and Rouen Opéra, the ensemble performed Le Malade imaginaire, the play by Molière, with music by Charpentier. The ensemble’s recordings for the Alpha label have met with rare public success, including the Grand Prix du Disque from l’Académie Charles Cros, the Diapason d’Or, a Prelude Classical Award in 2003, the Antonio Vivaldi International Award (Cini Foundation, Venice), the Caecilia Press Prize, and recommendations from Opéra International, Classica, and Le Monde de la Musique.

Vincent Dumestre (b. 1968) is the founder and artistic director of Le Poème Harmonique, with which he explores the vocal and instrumental repertoire of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. With this faithful team of artists he also seeks to revive the performing arts of the Baroque period, thereby favoring in many of his projects interaction with other artistic disciplines.

After studying art history at the École du Louvre and classical guitar at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, Dumestre turned to the lute, Baroque guitar, and theorbo, which he studied with Hopkinson Smith and Eugène Ferré, with Rolf Lislevand at the Toulouse Conservatoire, and in the continuo class at the Boulogne Conservatoire, where he was unanimously awarded the advanced diploma. Since then he has taken part in many concerts, in particular with the Ricercar Consort, La Simphonie du Marais, Le Concert des Nations, La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy, Akademia, and the ensembles of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. He has taken part in more than thirty recordings with those ensembles.

In 1998 Dumestre formed Le Poème Harmonique—a chamber ensemble and orchestra specializing in the Baroque repertoire. In 1999 the French music magazine Diapason voted Dumestre “Young Talent of the Year” for his work with Le Poème Harmonique. Over the past four years the repute of Dumestre and Le Poème Harmonique has grown spectacularly and the ensemble’s stage productions and concerts are now presented at many prestigious venues in France and abroad.