The Curious Bards

Violinist and founder of The Curious Bards, Alix Boivert explores the connections between Baroque music and folk traditions. His passion for research and forgotten repertoire shapes an approach in which the discovery of historical sources finds its expression in the energy and spontaneity of live performance.

He began his training with Robert Papavrami before continuing at the Bordeaux Conservatoire. After discovering the harpsichord and Baroque violin, he joined Odile Édouard’s class at the CNSMD in Lyon, graduating with a master’s degree in 2014. He has appeared as a soloist in major concert halls across Europe and has performed with ensembles including Le Concert Spirituel, Pygmalion, Correspondances, Amarillis and La Chapelle Rhénane.

Drawn to Irish and Scottish traditional music, he explored these traditions independently before deepening his experience during a year in Dublin. In 2015, he founded The Curious Bards, bringing the popular music of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Northern Europe to life. The ensemble has given more than 300 concerts and released three albums on harmonia mundi. A fourth recording, Rebellion!, devoted to Henry Purcell and featuring Philippe Katerine, is due for release in January 2027.

He is also developing Íorna, a stage production weaving together music, song and dance around the life of a woman weaver in eighteenth-century Ireland, alongside Évocation, a programme exploring Irish and Scottish songs arranged by Haydn and Beethoven.

His research now extends to the music heard in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as part of a planned residency project with Villa Albertine.

October 2026