Viola de gamba
An emblem of a new generation, Salomé Gasselin brings vivid color to the viola da gamba. Her career has been marked by numerous awards: among others, she was unanimously awarded the grand prize at the 2020 Gianni Bergamo Music Award in Lugano, Switzerland, and she received the second prize at the 2020 Bach-Abel competition in Germany. Her first album, Récit, has been praised for “making the viol vibrate.” It was selected by Le Monde as one of the “Promises of the Year” in 2023.
In 2024 she is appointed young instrumental soloist of the year (“Révélation soliste instrumental”) at the Victoires de la Musique Classique, France’s highest classical music awards.
Although she once believed that she’d win her first victories playing rugby, Salomé quickly decided that the concert hall was her preferred arena. She studied first at the CNSMD of Lyon with Marianne Muller, then in Holland at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague with Philippe Pierlot, and finally in Austria, at the Mozarteum Univertsity of Salzburg with Vittorio Ghielmi. Alongside music, Salomé studied modern literature at the University of Paris 10.
Salomé performs with many of the world’s leading ensembles – Pygmalion, Jupiter, Masques, Ratas del Viejo Mundo, le Poème Harmonique, and Capriccio Stravante – and has played at Wigmore Hall, the Musikverein of Vienna, the Paris Philharmonic, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the ElbPhilharmonie, among others. As a soloist, she has performed most recently at “La Folle Journée” in Nantes and La Roque-d’Anthéron, joined by Emmanuel Arakélian (organ), Justin Taylor (harpsichord) and Mathias Ferré (viol). With the Dutch harpsichordist Emmanuel Frankenberg and the Spanish flutist Pablo Sosa del Rosario, she explores French and German chamber repertoire. In Spring 2024, she will appear in duo with theorbist Jonathan Zehnder at Ohrdruf, for a program of Bach/Biber, and in a solo recital at Weimar during the Thüringer Bachwochen.
This year she is forming her own viol consort, in order to tackle some of her favorite repertoire.
Salomé is a professor of music at the Pierre Barbizet Conservatory of Marseille, where she created the viola da gamba class in 2021.
She plays a French bass viol made by Simon Bongars in 1653.
