Pierre Gallon

Biography

Pierre Gallon grew up in a home bursting at the seams with instruments of all kinds, a limitless playground. At the age of ten, he realised that the harpsichord was the most natural means of expression for him. Bibiane Lapointe and Thierry Maeder guided him to the doors of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and its early music classes, taught by Olivier Baumont and Blandine Rannou. He graduated in 2010 with two Premiers Prix and top honours. During his student years, his encounters with Blandine Verlet, Elisabeth Joyé and Pierre Hantaï were aesthetic epiphanies that profoundly shaped his approach to the instrument.

For Pierre Gallon, music is first and foremost a collective adventure: one that still leads him today to invest his energies in high-profile ensembles (notably Pygmalion, directed by Raphaël Pichon, of which he is the principal harpsichordist) with which he has made some thirty recordings. But this adventure follows other, equally captivating paths when Pierre explores the immense solo repertory for harpsichord, from the Renaissance to the present day.

In 2014, his first solo recording, devoted to Pierre Attaingnant, made a powerful impression.  Since then, he has been invited to give recitals at many festivals, including La Roque-d’Anthéron, Saintes, La Folle Journée de Nantes, Oude Muziek Utrecht, Poznań Baroque, the Venetian Centre for Baroque Music, and Royaumont Abbey, where he recorded his second disc, celebrating the music of Joseph Haydn (2017). His two most recent albums, released in 2020 and 2022, one imagining the meeting of Couperin and Froberger in Paris, the other presenting a previously unrecorded version of Bach’s French Suites, have been enthusiastically received by the press (two Diapasons d’Or, ffff in Télérama, CHOC and ‘Coup de cœur’ in Classica, Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Disc of the Year of RCF Radio).

Pierre also enjoys diverse experiences with his fellow keyboard players, performing with Bertrand Cuiller and his ensemble Le Caravansérail, and with Bande de Clavecins. He appears regularly in concert alongside the viol player Lucile Boulanger, the soprano Alice Foccroulle and the writer Pascal Quignard, or accompanied by his friends in Ground Floor and Les Harpies.

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