Baroque cellist and viola da gamba player Bruno Cocset is an influential figure on the French early music scene. He has played with many of Europe's leading historical performance groups and is the leader of his own, Les Basses Réunies.
Cocset was born in 1963 in Tours, France. He attended the Conservatoire National de Région de Tours there, studying cello with Didier Aubert and earning gold medals in cello, chamber music, and music theory. Cocset went on to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Lyon, studying with Alain Meunier and Jean Deplace, but he was unhappy and dropped out in 1983. He taught himself to play the gut-stringed Baroque cello and then began taking lessons from Christophe Coin. When Coin established a new Baroque cello and viola da gamba class at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse de Paris, Cocset enrolled. He graduated in 1986 with a unanimous first prize. Cocset also took master classes from cellist Anner Bylsma and violinist Jaap Schröder.
For the first part of his career, Cocset was active as a freelance cellist and gamba player, performing and recording with many of the leading Baroque music ensembles of the day. These included Les Arts Florissants, Coin's Ensemble Baroque de Limoges, and Les Musiciens du Louvre, with which Cocset appeared on a recording of Rameau's opera Platée in 1990. In 1996, Cocset created his own ensemble, Les Basses Réunies, focusing on the music of such neglected composers as Evaristo Felice dall'Abaco and Jean-Baptiste Barrière. With that group, he has toured widely in France and abroad, including places as far away as Russia, Quebec, and Lithuania, as well as in many western European countries. Cocset is on the faculty at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris, the School of Music in Catalonia, and the Geneva University of Music in Switzerland. He has made many recordings with Les Basses Réunies and with various ensembles directed by gamba player Jordi Savall. As a soloist and chamber player, he has made various recordings on the Alpha label, including one of Beethoven's cello sonatas in 2022. That year, he was also heard with the early music ensemble Le Caravansérail on a Harmonia Mundi recording of Domenico Scarlatti's Stabat Mater. ~ James Manheim, Rovi
