Benjamin Bayl studied as an Organ Scholar at King’s College Cambridge before immersing himself in conducting at the Royal Academy of Music with Colin Metters and George Hurst. He became the Assistant Conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer in 2006 and served as the  Assistant Artistic Director of the Gabrieli Consort and Paul McCreesh from 2007 to 2010. Bayl is the Associate Director of The Hanover Band and is a founding member of the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra. He will conduct the Collegium Vocale Gent and Akademie für Alte on their European tour featuring the music of CPE Bach and regularly collaborates with The Hanover Band, Concerto Copenhagen, Akamus, Wroclaw Baroque Orchestra, and Warsaw Chamber Opera.

Élodie Fonnard, trained as a pianist, began singing at the Conservatoire de Caen with Luc Coadou and later continued her studies with Alain Buet, Howard Crook and Kenneth Weiss. She is a member of Le Jardin des Voix’s William Christie and performs regularly with Les Arts Florissants. She also gives recitals with William Christie as a harpsichordist. Recent performances have included the title-role in Glück’s Orphée and Eurydice at the Opéra de Dijon, Diane in Charpentier’s Actéon in Los Angeles, and Euridice in Monteverdi’s Orfeo with Les Timbres. Ms Fonnard has recorded several operas including works by Rameau and  Charpentier, as well as Prévert and Kosma’s Songs, Jewish Baroque Music, and the Brossard and Bouteiller’s Motets.

Jarosław Thiel is a graduate of the Poznań School of Talents. He studied cello at both the Academy of Music in Poznań and the Academy of Music in Łódź, Poland. Since 1997, he has been focused on historical performance. He completed his post-graduate studies in Baroque cello at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, having worked with Phoebe Carrai and  Markus a Möllenbeck. Thiel has participated in master classes run by Christine Kypranides at the Dresdner Akademie für Alte Musik and has collaborated with the most important Polish ensembles specialising in early music. Thiel has been the first cellist with the Dresdner Barockorchester and a member of the Festspiel Orchester Göttingen led by Laurence Cummings since 2000. He also works with leading German ensembles, such as Cantus Cölln, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, and Lautten Compagney. He regularly performs as a soloist and chamber musician in connection with festivals of early music world-wide. He currently teaches Baroque cello at the Academy of Music in Poznań and the Summer Academy of Early Music in Lidzbark Warmiński, Poland.  In 2006 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Wrocław Baroque Orchestra.

Jean-Philippe Rameau emerged as a significant composer in France after the death of François Couperin in 1733. He spent his early career as organist at Clermont Cathedral before settling in Paris in 1722 where he published collections of harpsichord pieces as well as his Treatise on Harmony. Starting in 1733, he devoted himself to composing opera and also worked as a theorist. His theoretical works provided the scientific foundation for the development of traditional, functional harmony and composition well into the 19th century. Rameau contributed to a variety of dramatic forms including tragédies lyriques, comédies lyriques and comédies-ballets. Orchestral suites arranged from some of his stage works make much of this music, which fell out of favour around 1760, available to modern audiences. His operas were the first national creations to rival those of Lully. In his later career, Rameau composed a series of suites, the Pièces de clavecin en concerts, for harpsichord, flute or violin and second violin or viola.

Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator