Philippe Pierlot

Viola da gamba player and conductor Philippe Pierlot, distinct from the flutist sharing his name and notable for his own appearances on flute recordings, ranks among Belgium’s foremost authorities on historically informed performance. He is recognized above all as director of the Ricercar Consort, yet he has also established himself as an influential teacher.

Born in Liège in 1958, Pierlot already displayed a keen fascination with early music by age twelve, when he began studying the lute, recorder, and guitar. His viola da gamba instructor was Wieland Kuijken, a foundational figure in the historical-performance revival across the Low Countries. In 1980 he established the Ricercar Consort, an ensemble devoted equally to performing and to recording seldom-heard Baroque repertoire in period-informed style. The group issued several discs of German Baroque choral and instrumental works before embarking, in 1985, on a tour centered on Bach’s A Musical Offering—the composition whose celebrated ricercar movement had supplied the ensemble’s name. Pierlot has appeared frequently as a soloist, extending his programs past the Baroque to encompass contemporary pieces written expressly for him. Beyond the gamba he plays the infrequently encountered baryton, the instrument for which Haydn composed roughly 150 works.

He brought Marin Marais’s opera Sémélé back to the stage after three centuries of silence, reconstructing incomplete scores and supplying new music where required. In addition, he has led choral programs, often adopting the one-voice-per-part principle, as well as other vocal repertory. Serving as both artistic director and gambist of the Ricercar Consort, Pierlot has produced more than forty recordings, among them the 2018 Bach cantata collection Consolatio. The ensemble’s discs have appeared chiefly on the Ricercar, Flora, and Mirare labels; a 2020 Mirare release presented music by gamba master Jean de Sainte-Colombe, followed in 2021 by an album of Beethoven’s Irish songs with soprano Maria Keohane. The 2023 release Buxtehude: Salvator Mundi brought Pierlot’s total recorded output to approximately fifty albums. His teaching posts have included the Hochschule für Musik Trossingen in Germany, the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels.