In 2008, Simon-Pierre Bestion creates with singer friends the Luce del Canto Choir, professional ensemble whose members share the same desire : to support the choir repertory, from the middle-ages until now.
Valuing the variety of timbers and personalities of the singers, Simon-Pierre Bestion places the human being in the center of music. That’s how the choir tends to build its identity, looking for an incarnated sound, caracterised by its warmth and variety of colors. Whether a cappella, with orchester or with few instruments, it is above all the choir’s voice which counts : a finally unique voice and breath, which uses at best the diversity of each singer’s artistic identity.
Luce del Canto likes encounters, mixing people and styles. It thus regularly associates with stage directors, dancers and actors who feed its vision of music as a « living performance ». Luce’s interpretation is consequently carnal and organic, and aims at creating an atmosphere for each repertoire. The choir is thus often trying to get into the movement and spacialisation –always subtle- that can be felt in each composer’s music. The directed choir thus becomes the director of the music it interprets, which leads each singer into being deeply and individually involved.
Luce explores with a demanding passion music of all the ages : the Middle-Ages (Cantigas de Santa Maria, Pérotin…), the Renaissance (Brumel, Desprez, Machaut, de Rore…), the Italian (Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Rossi, Rigatti…), German (JS Bach, JL Bach…) or English Baroque (Purcell),as well as romantic Lieder (Schubert, Brahms, Wolf…). In parallel, Luce also likes to defend music of great composers of the XXth century (Boulanger, Caplet, Chausson, Fauré, Ravel, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Messiaen, Barber, Britten, Bernstein) and of our contemporaries (Florentz, Villeneuve, Ohana, Tavener, Pärt, Pécou, Hersant or Dufour).
Luce del Canto is sponsored by the Fondation Orange, the city of Neuilly-sur-Seine (92), Musique Nouvelle en Liberté, the Spedidam and the Adami, and is in residency in the Collège des Bernardins in Paris.