Les Ambassadeurs - La Grande Écurie

Les Ambassadeurs - La Grande Écurie, a Baroque-oriented French orchestra, resulted from the fusion of two existing groups, Les Ambassadeurs and La Grande Écurie et La Chambre du Roy. The new ensemble has released several albums on the Aparte and Château de Versailles labels. The ultimate ancestor of Les Ambassadeurs - La Grande Écurie ("La Grande Écurie" means "the great stable," referring specifically to the stable of musicians surrounding King Louis XIV) was La Grande Écurie et La Chambre du Roy. That group dated back to 1966 and was among the first historical-instrument ensembles in France. Its founder was Jean-Claude Malgoire, who remained its director until his death in 2018. That group often played French Baroque music but had a wide repertory stretching from the medieval composer Machaut to Debussy. Les Ambassadeurs was founded in 2012 by flutist and conductor Alexis Kossenko. That group had a similarly broad repertory, centered on the music of Rameau and the French Baroque but extending outward to Bach and Purcell and forward to Mozart and Beethoven. The musicians of La Grande Écurie et La Chambre du Roy chose Kossenko as their new director in 2019, partly as a result of that similarity. Kossenko announced in 2020 that he envisioned a common future for the two groups, and after a period of inactivity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the new Les Ambassadeurs - La Grande Écurie emerged in the early 2020s with a variety of performance projects, including a production of the rare opera Zémire et Azor of André Grétry, under the direction of conductor Louis Langrée. The new united group was signed to the Aparte label and released its debut album, Per l'Orchestra di Dresda, Vol. 1, with Kossenko as conductor in 2021. Les Ambassadeurs - La Grande Écurie have released several more recordings, including those of Rameau's operas Achante et Céphise and Zoroastre, as well as the album Festin Royale du mariage du Comte d'Artois - Versailles 1773 in 2023. That year, the group ventured beyond Baroque repertory with a historically oriented recording of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 90 ("Italian"), and Symphony No. 5 in D major/D minor, Op. 107 ("Reformation").
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