Ensemble Près de votre oreille & Robin Pharo
Biography Ensemble Près de votre oreille & Robin Pharo
Robin Pharo
studied the viola da gamba with Jean-Louis Charbonnier, Caroline Howald, Ariane Maurette and Christophe Coin, at the Music and Dance’s National Conservatory of Paris. He is a founder member of the Quartet Nevermind with whom he won the third prize and the special festival prize at the Van Wassenaer competition in Utrecht. In 2017, Nevermind has been invited to play all over Europe, in Russia, in Iceland, Australia, Asia and USA and has recorded tree discs, Conversations (2016), Quatuors Parisiens (2017) and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (2021) with Alpha Classic Label.
He played with the actor Benjamin Lazar in the show L’Autre Monde ou les états et Empires de la lune and has been engaged in numerous early music bands such as l’ensemble Pygmalion (Raphaël Pichon), Aedes (Mathieu Romano), Le Poème Harmonique (Vincent Dumestre), La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy (Jean-Claude Malgoire), l’ensemble La Rêveuse (Florence Bolton et Benjamin Perrot), l’ensemble Marguerite-Louise (Gaétan Jarry), La Tempête (Simon-Pierre Bestion de Camboulas), La Cappella Mediterranea (Leonardo Garcia Alarcon), l’Achéron (François Joubert-Caillet), l'ensemble Maja (Bianca Chillemi), Vox Luminis (Lionel Meunier) etc…. ). In April 2012, Robin Pharo is invited to accompany Bobby McFerrin, on the stage of Châtelet theater, in Paris. He collaborated with the choregrapher Thierry Thieu Niang and composed the music of the show Au Cœur, programmed at the festival d’Avignon in 2016. He also played in the show Romances Inciertos, created by François Chaignaud and Nina Laisné. He works presently with contemporary composers such as Fabien Touchard or Philippe Hersant, wich who he creatd Hypnos and La Harpe de David as well as Rika Suzuki, Yassen Vodenitcharov and Jean-Marc Chouvel (with whom he creates Les Trois ailes du papillon). He had been playing at the Hyperweekend festival at France Radio and created the project Phonographie, imaginated by the group Code (Jérémie Arcache and Léonardo Ortega), together with the electronic musician Superpoze, with who he created a new piece in tribute to Marin Marais.s.
Ensemble Pres de votre oreille
Through its strangeness and poetry, the name of the ensemble Près de votre oreille has naturally become the singular identity of a young instrumental and vocal ensemble, initiating atypical projects. Since 2017, Robin Pharo has thus satisfied his intense desire for creation and musical and human encounters that forged his artistic personality. The ensemble presents many unusual gems, which constantly arouse curiosity, and affirms its willingness to defend both the repertoires of the past, notably from the Renaissance to the end of the Baroque era, as well as contemporary creation. By carrying out numerous experimental projects on our relationship to the concert, it places at the heart of its development a broad reflection on classical music, between performances, recitals, meetings, sharing, voices and instruments.
In 2020, the Près de votre oreille ensemble received support for the first time from the Caisse des Dépôts Musical Patronage. It created its program Blessed Echoes (co-production with the Cité de la voix de Vézelay and the Entente Cordiale Cultural Center of the Château d'Hardelot) and has been at the origin of several creations in English since 2019: Come Sorrow, A Byrd celebration, in tribute to William Byrd for the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of his death (creation residency at the Embaroquement Immédiat festival, in partnership with the Pontoise Baroque Festival and the International Renaissance Music Festival of the Château du Clos Lucé), Lachrimae or seven tears, Both Alike and The Last Dawn of consort. Since 2023, the ensemble has been based in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, as part of several collaborations with the Villefavard farm in Limousin, such as the creation of its program "Mes amours durent en tout temps", dedicated to Franco-Flemish Renaissance song (project supported by the DRAC Nouvelle Aquitaine), and the organization in 2025 of the first edition of its itinerant festival "L'éveil de l'automne". Alongside a week of educational activities with the Villefavard farm, it has inaugurated its own experimental laboratory for the diffusion of classical music and live performance. It will strive to offer a new way of discovering our human and natural heritage with the organization of events and strolls aimed at highlighting the beauty of biodiversity through artistic expressions, while raising awareness about environmental protection. Since its creation, the Près de votre oreille ensemble has also been involved in numerous cultural and educational outreach activities, with the Gennevilliers Conservatory, the Boulogne-sur-Mer Conservatory, the Jacques Brel Cultural and Social Center in Outreau, the Atelier Musical de l'Oise and the Saisons Baroques du Jura.
The association Près de votre oreille has carried out six recording projects: L’Anonyme Parisien (Paraty, 2016), Come Sorrow (Paraty, 2019), Suite d'un goût étranger (Château de Versailles Spectacles label, 2021), Blessed Echoes (Paraty, 2023), The Waves (Scala Music, 2023) in duet with mezzo soprano Anaïs Bertrand and devoted to contemporary works by Philippe Hersant, Fabien Touchard and Robin Pharo, as well as arrangements of melodies by Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Nadia Boulanger and Lou Koster, and Lighten mine eies (Harmonia Mundi, September 2025).
The ensemble has had the opportunity to perform throughout France in prestigious venues such as the Embaroquement Immédiat festival, the Elizabethan theatre and the Midsummer festival at the Château d'Hardelot, the Saintes festival, the Musicales de Normandie, the Lille Opera, the Musée Grévin theatre (Philippe Maillard Production), the Athénée théâtre Louis-Jouvet, La Scala Paris, the Périgord Noir festival, the Château de Lunéville, the Rencontres Musicales de Vézelay, the Sablé festival, the Ambronay Festival, the Lanvellec Festival and the Tarentaise Baroque festival, in Europe, at the Nasz Telemann festival in Poland, the Max festival and the Hainaut festival in Belgium, the La Folia festival, the Usine à gaz in Nyon in Switzerland and the Valletta Baroque festival in Malta. In 2024, the ensemble toured Canada, reprising its Blessed Echoes program, including performances at Montreal's Bourgie Hall, the Early Music in Vancouver season, the Palais Montcalm in Quebec City, and the Isabel Bader Center in Kingston.
In 2025, Près de votre oreille began a new partnership with the Harmonia Mundi label for the release of its upcoming album, Lighten mine eies, dedicated to William Lawes. This project will lead to an upcoming tour in France tour of France, including the Midsummer Festival in Hardelot, the Musicales du Causse de Gramat, and the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Musiq3 Festival and the Max Festival in Belgium, and Spain, at the Institute of Culture and Arts in Seville. He will also record his next album: Enfin ses beaux yeux, at the Dominican Convent in Guebwiller, devoted to previously unpublished court arias from the era of Louis XIII (vocal works by Gabriel Bataille, Antoine Boësset, and Pierre Guédron, and arrangements for viola da gamba and basso continuo of Baroque lute pieces by René Mezengeau, Le Vieux Gauthier, and François Dufaut).
The ensemble was committed to promoting contemporary music since the creation of the piece The Voynich Manuscript, composed by Bulgarian composer Yassen Vodenitcharov for mezzo-soprano and viola consort, and the choreographic performance Les Trois Ailes du Papillon (works by Rika Suzuki, Yassen Vodenitcharov, and Jean-Marc Chouvel) and will be in residence at the TAP in Poitiers in 2026 for the creation of his chamber opera project, Les vies ordinaire d'Anaïs. Commissioned from composer Fabien Touchard with a libretto by author Milena Csergo, who will also direct the project (the prologue of which was premiered at the Cité de la Voix in Vézelay in the fall of 2023), the opera describes the life of a singer and her dream of giving birth. Using a mise en abyme, it breaks free from the boundaries between reality and fiction and draws on the daily lives of musicians, singers, and singers to create a poetic tale on the universal subject of birth. This residency will attempt to lay the foundations for a creation planned for the 2026/2027 season. In 2026, the ensemble will continue its tour for the release of the album Lighten mine eies and will have the immense pleasure of making its debut in England, where it will perform several times, notably at the Wigmore Hall as well as the French Institute in London and in Edinburgh.
