La Guitare Napoléonienne

La Guitare Napoléonienne: French Music for Early Romantic Guitar

Pascal Valois

Contemporaneously with Napoleon’s rise, “Guitaromanie” reached its height in salons throughout the French capital. Whether for Fernando Sor’s new fantasia or Louis-Ange Carpentras’s arrangements of operas, new guitar works were entusiastically embraced, opening a new world of repertoire to the freshly empowered bourgeois musicians of post-Revolutionary era. Thanks to its clarity, precision, richness, and diversity, its dramatic twists and turns, this Parisian music is as fresh today as it was to the post-Ancien Régime world.

This concert is made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of NYU Maison Française and generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation.

Pascal Valois is dedicated to reviving enthusiasm for the guitar scene during the Romantic era. He performs music from the nineteenth-century repertoire by using various period instruments, ornamentation, stylistic practices of the period, as well as improvisation, which was customary in that era.

After graduating with honours at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal under Jean Vallières, and receiving the award Pierre J. Jeanniot during his studies at Université du Québec à Montréal with Alvaro Pierri, Valois studied romantic guitar with Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and with David Starobin in New York. He has also received a doctorate in Performance Practice from Université Laval. Recently, he has played in Basel, Paris, Riga, San Francisco, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto. He has been a soloist with many ensembles, among them Rigas’s Ensemble Samsara and Montreal’s Les Idées Heureuses. He has also given master-classes in many institutions, including the Manhattan School of music, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal.

Pascal Valois has received the most renowned bursaries in Canada for guitar performance (Canada Council for the Arts) as well as Musicology (FQRSC and SSHRC). He has also been awarded scholarships from the Desjardins Foundation, the Wilfrid-Pelletier Foundation, the Laval University Foundation, and the Université du Québec à Montréal Foundation.

“Pascal Valois and his instrument are united in an absolutely masterful and rigorous delivery.”

—   Journal Le Métropolitain de Toronto 

“Valois played with grace, elegance, and élan. His phrasing was similarly remarkable, as he imbued each melody with a beautiful vocal quality. It was light, effortless, and full of spirit.”

— Giacomo Fiore, Classicalguitar.org