Biography (read more)
Pascal Ghislain Edmond Marie Monteilhet was born in 1955 in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. He began classical guitar at age nine and studied lute with Eugen Dombois and Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, becoming in 1982 the first French lutenist to graduate from that institution. After a two-year career break spent traveling the Pacific (1983–84), he performed with leading historically informed conductors including Fabio Biondi, Christophe Coin, Gérard Lesne, Marc Minkowski, Philippe Pierlot, and Christophe Rousset, and was a permanent member of Gérard Lesne’s ensemble Il Seminario Musicale from its 1985 founding. In 1995 he formed his own ensemble, Les Libertins, and in 1996 co-founded Les Basses Réunies with harpsichordist Blandine Rannou, bassist Richard Myron, and cellist Bruno Cocset. He taught lute at the CNR de Paris from 1991 and at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP) from 1994. After releasing a 2005 recording of Robert de Visée’s theorbo suites, he announced his retirement from music, sold his instruments, and largely withdrew from public life; he died of a heart attack in the Philippines on 23 August 2022, aged 67. No English Wikipedia article exists; the French Wikipedia article was fetched and confirmed correct.
As the first French graduate of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis lute program, Monteilhet helped establish a French school of historically informed lute and theorbo playing, and his solo recordings of Dufaut, Gallot, and Piccinini and his theorbo continuo work with Il Seminario Musicale and Les Basses Réunies were influential within the French Baroque revival of the 1990s and 2000s. Christophe Rousset recalled him as an extraordinarily gifted soloist whose playing was profoundly moving to hear.
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