Dominique Vellard is an important figure in France's historically informed early music scene, with a career stretching back to the late '70s when such music was fairly rare. The founder and director of the Ensemble Gilles Binchois, Vellard has also been active as a singer, lutenist, arranger, composer, and musicologist. Vellard and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois have a substantial recording catalog dating back to the 1980s, much of it on the Glossa and Evidence Classics labels. In 2024, they released the album Timor Mortis. Vellard was born in France in 1953. His early training came in Versailles, first as a chorister at the Maîtrise de Notre-Dame and then as a student at the Versailles Conservatory. As his interest in early music developed, he founded the Ensemble Gilles Binchois (not to be confused with Britain's Binchois Consort), naming it after the Burgundian composer who died in 1460. The group has had a core membership of about ten and often sings a cappella, although it has added singers and instrumentalists as appropriate; in the latter category is Vellard's own lute. In performance, the group has focused not only on its namesake composer but also on other French works of the late medieval and early Renaissance eras, including Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, and lesser-known composers, such as Jehannot de l'Escurel. The group toured the U.K. as well as Germany, and countries in Eastern Europe, in addition to France. Vellard and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois are notable for the depth of their recording catalog, which began in 1982 with an album of chant and has proceeded through stints with the Virgin, Cantus, Glossa, and Evidence Classics labels. An early Vellard release in the digital era was 1987's Dufay, Binchois: Ballades, Rondeaux, Lamentation. The Ensemble Gilles Binchois has, especially in the 21st century, performed Vellard's own compositions, which incorporate Indian influences as well as those from European medieval music. He has written a mass and various smaller vocal works, some of which were collected on the 2007 album Vox nostra resonet on the Glossa label. For Evidence Classics, Vellard led the group in the album Messes de Barcelone et d'Apt in 2019, exploring medieval music from those Spanish and Provençal cities. Vellard and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois remained active during the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing albums annually on Evidence Classics and even venturing into the 19th century with Franz Liszt: Septem Sacramenta in 2022. In 2024, Vellard and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois issued the album Timor Mortis, a collection of little-known Renaissance pieces on the theme of death, on Evidence Classics. ~ James Manheim, Rovi

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Dominique Vellard

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