Mélisande Corriveau & Eric Milnes
Biography Mélisande Corriveau & Eric Milnes
Mélisande Corriveau
Devotee of Renaissance and baroque music, enthusiast of historic instruments, travel and gourmet food, Mélisande Corriveau is mother to two charming adolescents!
Player of recorders, cello, all viols including the pardessus de viol, she has become a virtuoso at l’Art de toucher, as Couperin put it, on her bevy of instruments. She hunts for new repertoire, is inspired by treatises and takes a keen interest in the historic context of music in society and the musical languages the societies created. Her next conquest is to be the violoncello piccolo!
Playing with her inspiring colleagues with whom she shares so much extraordinary music, musical cameraderie and close friendship, is at the heart of her musical life! She feels privileged to work with her companion and duo partner, musical director and keyboardist, Eric Milnes, her consort partners in Les Voix humaines, her group L’Harmonie des Saisons and her European colleagues in Ensemble Masques, all giving her the gift of ongoing fascinating projects and travel to exotic lands, a nomadic life that reflects the music she loves!
Gramophone: “Mélisande Corriveau is of the new generation of musicians gifted with great interpretive talent as well as knowledge of performance practice… virtuosity, delicacy and elegance, sensitivity and refinement all in the service of colourful and textured expressivity…”
Mélisande Corriveau has recorded extensively on several labels and her recent CD of French 18th century music, Pardessus de viole with Eric Milnes was included in the CBC’s top ten while her ensemble L’Harmonie des saisons was winner of a Juno award in 2016.
She plays on a 1691 Barak Norman viol, a Nathaniel Cross cello from 1700, and a pardessus de viole by Pierre Le Pilleur dated 1755.
Eric Milnes
has been critically acclaimed throughout North America and Europe as one of the most dynamic and compelling early music directors and keyboard artists of the younger generation. A native New Yorker, his imaginative and energized performances have been applauded at the Utrecht, Bremen, Regensburg, Lufthansa, Passau, Boston, Mostly Mozart, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Berkeley, Santa Fe and San Francisco Early Music Festivals, and in performances in every major North American and European center. As conductor he has directed New York Baroque, The New York Collegium, Trinity Consort, Portland, Oregon, The Northwest Chamber Orchestra, Seattle, I Cantori di New York, Musica Divina, Ottawa, Les Boreades de Montreal, La Bande Montreal Baroque, and Baroquen Voices, Montreal.
As harpsichordist and organist, he has recorded and/or performed with Gustav Leonhardt, Reinhard Goebel, Fabio Biondi, Christophe Rousset, Martin Jester, Andrew Parrott, Manfredo Kraemer, Barthold Kuikjen, Les Voix humaines, Ensemble Rebel, Les Boreades, The American Bach Soloists, and ensembles across North America. Recordings under his direction include Hebrew motets of Salamone Rossi, vocal cantatas of Barbara Strozzi, sacred music of Heinrich Schütz, vocal chamber music of Ristori from Dresden, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, The St. John Passion of Bach, and Bach Sacred Cantatas. A published composer, Mr. Milnes has served with the faculty of several universities and conservatories in New York and in Norway. His degrees are from Columbia University, New York, and The Juilliard School, New York.
