Bach en fête!

Les Violons du Roy and La Chapelle de Québec Music Director

Ann Birks Chairholder*

Internationally renowned for his expertise in Baroque and Classical repertoire, Bernard Labadie is the founding conductor of Les Violons du Roy, where he served as music director from 1984 to 2014 and returns to the position at the end of October 2025. He is also music director of La Chapelle de Québec choir, which he founded in 1985.

As head of both ensembles, he has toured Europe and North America performing at some of the most illustrious concert halls and festivals: Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center (New York), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), Kennedy Center (Washington), the Barbican (London), Berlin Philharmonie, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (Paris), Brussels’ Centre for Fine Arts, and the Salzburg, Bergen, Rheingau, and Schleswig-Holstein festivals.

In 2017, Bernard Labadie took up the position of principal conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York, a post he leaved at the end of the 2024–2025 season after eight highly successful years. He has conducted the orchestra’s annual concert series at Carnegie Hall, often accompanied by La Chapelle de Québec.

A much sought-after guest conductor in North America, he makes frequent appearances with major American and Canadian orchestras: Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Houston, New World Symphony, Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa. In Europe, he has conducted the Mozarteum of Salzburg and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the orchestras of Lyon, Bordeaux-Aquitaine, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. He has also headed several radio orchestras, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the radio orchestras in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hanover, and Helsinki.

Bernard Labadie regularly collaborates with some of the most prestigious period-instrument early music ensembles: Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, The English Concert, Academy of Ancient Music, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Handel and Haydn Society (Boston).

At the opera, he served as artistic director of Opéra de Québec from 1994 to 2003 and as artistic director of Opéra de Montréal from 2002 to 2006. He has also appeared as guest conductor with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, and the Santa Fe, Cincinnati, and Glimmerglass operas. In 2021, he made his debut appearance at the Glyndebourne Festival.

Both as a guest conductor and with Les Violons du Roy, Bernard Labadie has recorded some twenty albums for Virgin Classics (now Erato), EMI, Pentatone, Dorian, ATMA, Hyperion, and Naïve.

A tireless ambassador for music in his hometown of Québec City, Bernard Labadie was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Knight of the Ordre national du Québec, and Compagnon des arts et des lettres du Québec. He is also a recipient of the Medal of Honour of the National Assembly of Québec, the Banff Centre’s National Arts Award, the Samuel de Champlain Award, and honorary doctorates from Université Laval (Alma Mater) and the Manhattan School of Music.

*The position of Music Director of La Chapelle de Québec is endowed through the generosity of Mrs. Ann Birks.

Sasha Calin is principal oboe of the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg, Austria, and plays guest principal with orchestras including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Munich State Opera, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Haydn Philharmonie, Camerata Salzburg and Cappella Andrea Barca. She has worked with many of the world’s leading conductors, including Sir Simon Rattle, Ivan Fischer, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Ivor Bolton, Sir Colin Davis, Vladimir Jurowski and András Schiff.

After completing an undergraduate course in Geography at the University of Cambridge and a postgraduate Diploma in Performance at the Royal Academy of Music, Sasha Calin was awarded a scholarship with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to study in Leipzig. Whilst there, she played regularly with the Gewandhaus Orchestra before winning a position in the Academy of the Zurich Opera House. During her two years in Switzerland, she appeared frequently with Welsh National Opera and the London Symphony Orchestra. Also an accomplished baroque and classical oboist, she has collaborated with ensembles such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Orchestra La Scintilla, Leipzig Baroque Orchestra and Les Musiciens du Louvre.

As a chamber musician, Sasha Calin as appeared at numerous international festivals, including Weissensee Klassik (Austria), Milch und Honig (Austria), Bridging Arts (Germany) and Holidays with Music (UK). Increasingly engaged as a soloist, she has performed the oboe concertos by Strauss, Mozart and Vaughan Williams, Bach’s Double Concerto for Oboe and Violin (with Roberto González-Monjas), and the solo part in Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante at the Salzburg Festival. Sasha Calin is also a sought-after teacher and has taught at the Verbier Amateur Chamber Music Week, Salzburg College, Salzburg International Summer Academy and the International Chamber Music Master Course in Frutillar, Chile. In addition, she has led workshops for students and young professionals on the mental aspects of performance.

Flutist Ariane Brisson never ceases to captivate audiences and critics with the finesse of her playing and the sincerity of her interpretations, seizing every opportunity to surprise and offer a unique voice on the musical scene. Her nomination as Discovery of the Year at the 24th Opus Awards Gala and as Grand Laureate at the coveted Prix d’Europe are among the many distinctions that mark her career.

An accomplished and versatile musician, Ariane Brisson's most recent collaborations with Les Violons du Roy, the Trois-Rivières and Drummondville Symphonic Orchestras, I Musici and the Neues Zürcher Orchester (Switzerland) as a soloist have allowed the flautist to present a vast repertoire, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Guillaume Connesson.

Charmed by the fluidity and sensitivity of Ariane’s playing, the musicians of the renowned wind quintet Pentaèdre invited her to join the ensemble in 2016. She has been its artistic director since 2019. Curious, Ariane’s reflections led her to complete a doctorate in performance at the Université de Montréal in 2022, under the tutelage of Jean-François Rivest and Michel Duchesneau, and thus to rethink the interpretation and pedagogy of the transverse flute. In May 2022, Ariane Brisson and pianist Olivier Hébert-Bouchard’s very first album for flute and piano, Mythes, was released on the ATMA Classique label, which features exclusively original transcriptions by the flutist. In March 2025, a disc dedicated to two Sonatas for flute and piano by Prokofiev, with pianist Philip Chiu, will be released, still under the ATMA label.

Principal flute of the Drummondville Symphony Orchestra and the Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Ariane also leads fruitful collaborations with the greatest orchestral ensembles in Quebec, including Les Violons du Roy, the Orchestre Métropolitain and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, leading her to perform regularly in North America, Europe and Asia. A sought-after and passionate teacher, the flutist has been teaching with great enthusiasm since 2019 at the Faculty of Music of the Université de Montréal, where she is a lecturer.

Ariane Brisson would like to particularly thank the Fondation du Prix d’Europe, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), the Sylva-Gelber Foundation, the Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique (OICRM) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), foundations and organizations that allow her to ambitiously realize her various artistic and research projects. Sensitive to the various aesthetics of the musical repertoire, Ariane plays in turn on a Yamaha transverse flute made of grenadilla wood, as well as on a Powell 10K flute kindly loaned by the Compagnie Canimex Inc. (Drummondville, Canada), owned by patron Roger Dubois.

Pascale Giguère has been a member of Les Violons du Roy since 1995. She was co-concertmaster from 2000 to 2013, and has been concertmaster since 2014. She has performed with the ensemble in some of the world’s leading venues, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Carnegie Hall in New York, and at leading festivals in Canada, the United States and Europe. Pascale Giguère has also taken part in recordings with Les Violons for the labels Dorian, Atma and Virgin Classics.

In recent years, Pascale Giguère has appeared as a soloist with Les Violons du Roy, in particular in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons; the latter work was recorded by Atma and received a Juno award. She has also performed with the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, Orchestre symphonique de Laval and Orchestre des Grands Ballets Canadiens, with which she played Stravinsky’s Concerto in D, an experience she repeated in December 2006 with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec conducted by Yoav Talmi. In recent seasons she has appeared as a guest soloist at the Domaine Forget international festival and the Parry Sound Festival.  

Pascale Giguère studied at the Montréal Conservatory with Raymond Dessaints, obtaining Premier Prix diplomas in violin and chamber music. She has also won several important prizes, including Grand Prize at the CIBC National Music Festival, First Prize at the Orchestre symphonique de Québec competition, and the prestigious Prix d’Europe award in 1993, which allowed her to continue her studies at Boston University with Roman Totenberg, Peter Zazovski and the Muir Quartet.

Pascale was awarded the Canada Council Instrument Bank’s 1700 Bell Giovanni Tononi violin to play from 2006 to 2008.

Pascale Giguère plays a Carlo Ferdinando Landolfi violin (Milan, 1745), purchased and generously loaned by Marthe Bourgeois.

Canadian violinist Katya Poplyansky is a prizewinner at numerous competitions including the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Tunbridge Wells and Eckhardt-Gramatté competitions, where she was awarded the prize for the best performance of the commissioned work, Carmen Braden’s Foxy Fox’s Musical Games. An accomplished chamber musician, she has been invited to participate in North American and European festivals, including the Toronto Summer Music Festival, IMS Prussia Cove (UK), Festival Jong Talent Schiermonnikoog (Netherlands), Hvide Sande Masterclass (Denmark), and the Smithsonian Haydn Quartet Academy (USA). She has also collaborated with Amici Chamber Ensemble and the ARC Ensemble. She is currently serving as first violin of the Isabel Quartet at Queen’s University as well as concertmaster of the Kingston Symphony Orchestra. In July 2024, she was named co-concertmaster of Les Violons du Roy in Québec City.

Katya Poplyansky is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, the Guildhall School and the Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School, where she was also a Rebanks Fellow. Her teachers include Paul Kantor, Barry Shiffman, David Takeno, Ida Kavafian, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Oleg Pokhanovski, Atis Bankas, Victor Danchenko, Inga Granovskaya, and Joseph Silverstein. She is currently pursuing her Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Toronto, studying with Jonathan Crow.

Katya Poplyansky plays a violin Giuseppe Guarneri "de/ Gesù", Cremona, ca. 1726-29, and uses a Eugène Nicolas Sartory violin bow, silver mounted, Paris, ca. 1910, and a Andrew Dipper baroque violin bow, generously provided by CANIMEX INC. of Drummondville (Quebec) Canada.

Noëlla Bouchard joined Les Violons du Roy in 1995. Since then, she has played in several hundred concerts, some 30 international tours, and numerous recordings with this chamber orchestra in residence at Palais Montcalm – Maison de la musique in Quebec City.

Noëlla Bouchard began learning the violin at the age of five with Lucille Johnstone and continued her studies at Conservatoire de musique de Montréal from 1982 to 1992 in classes taught by Johanne Arel, Raymond Dessaints, Robert Verebes, Denis Brott, and Raffi Armenian. She earned her first award there in 1992. From 1992 to 1995 she continued to hone her skills with Moshe Hammer in Toronto. In 1994 she was a finalist at the International Stepping Stone Canadian Music Competition in Vancouver.  She has participated in a number of workshops at Domaine Forget, Camp musical des Laurentides, and Orford Musique.

In recent years, Noëlla Bouchard has been invited to Concerts du Bic (2016) and the Music and Beyond Festival in Ottawa (2018) and has played on a recording of André Mathieu’s chamber music with pianist Jean-Michel Dubé (2019).

Noëlla Bouchard plays a Spiritus Sorfana violin, fecit Cunei, 1725, using an Charles Peccatte bow generously donated by CANIMEX INC. of Drummondville, Québec, Canada.

Born in Montreal, Suren Barry is a versatile musician, equally at home on the piano, fortepiano, and harpsichord. Having performed with some of the world's most renowned early music ensembles, he has established himself as a sought-after specialist, winning second prize at the Jurow Competition in 2024 and a scholarship from the English Concert of America.

Suren Barry teaches continuo at the University of Montreal and regularly collaborates with ensembles in Canada and the United States, such as Les Violons du Roy, the Twelfth Night ensemble, Ensemble Caprice, and I Musici de Montréal. He also pursues a career as a pianist, performing regularly alongside Carson Becke of the Octavian Duo, an ensemble dedicated to commissioning contemporary music and arranging orchestral works.