With a ‘variable geometry’, the ensemble Les Curiosités Esthétiques has its roots in the Europe of the Enlightenment, the time of Voltaire, Mozart, Frederick the Great, Haydn, the sons of Bach and the young Beethoven. It seeks to revive forgotten scores while discovering others, to trace in the crafting of a chord or an orchestral colour the beginnings of a modernity which still absorb our contemporaries, and to investigate this famous notion of ‘authenticity’, at once beautiful and artificial, characterised by respect and also by illusion…