La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy was France's first period-instrument ensemble and performed large numbers of operatic, choral, and instrumental works that had never been performed before in France according to historical principles. In 2018, after the death of its founder, the group merged with the early music ensemble Les Ambassadeurs. La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy ("The Great Stable and the Chamber of the King") was formed in 1966 by Orchestre de Paris oboist and freelance conductor Jean-Claude Malgoire. France had been home to historical keyboardists and other instrumentalists, but it was the country's first historical-performance ensemble. The group quickly found an audience and gave regular concerts from its first days; by the mid-'70s, it was drawing attention from across France and beyond. The group made LP recordings of Handel's Water Music in 1974 and of the Jean-Baptiste Lully opera Alceste the following year; at the time, the latter work was very rarely performed, and the album attracted critical notice. Both albums were made for the Columbia label. From the beginning, La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy was an ensemble of flexible composition, expanding from a core chamber-sized group to 40 or more players for larger late Baroque- and Classical-era operas. The group performed a number of Handel operas in the late '70s and early '80s and recorded three of them. A 1993 recording of Vivaldi's Vêpres pour la Nativité de la Vierge brought the group a Grand Prix du Disque, one of the many awards earned over its long recording career. In between tours of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy programmed performances of Mozart's operas with libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte in the '90s and made several recordings of them on the Naïve label. The group continued to attract the attention of major recording labels and issued new recordings of Handel's operas Rinaldo, Serse, Tamerlano, and Orlando on Sony Classical. In all, La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy made more than 100 recordings. One of the last was of the Missa Solemnis for King John VI of Portugal by the little-known Sigismund Neukomm, and the group continued to record little-known repertory, some but by no means all of which was French. After Malgoire's death in 2018, the group's name was truncated to La Grande Écurie, and it merged with the ensemble Les Ambassadeurs under the direction of Alexis Kossenko. The new joint ensemble, billing itself as Les Ambassadeurs - La Grande Écurie, released the album Per l'Orchestra di Dresda, Vol. 1: Ouverture on the Aparte label in 2021. ~ James Manheim, Rovi