top of page
Sonia Lardy & Quentin Meurisse
Collectif Medusa
The Medusa Collective is a chamber music ensemble founded in 2023 by soprano Sonia Lardy and pianist Quentin Meurisse.

Biography
It was during a collaboration between the Erämaa Trio and the singer around a contemporary music recital that Sonia and Quentin met. They then had the idea of ​​setting up a project focused on female composers from yesterday and today, their shared interest in the visibility of these repertoires leading them to set up their first recital in my room, around the composers Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke and Fanny Libert.
Rather than founding a duo, the musicians preferred to opt for a variable geometry ensemble in the form of a collective, in order to foster partnerships with other musicians, composers and artists, while allowing them to explore different forms around the piano and voice.
Among the other areas that Sonia and Quentin wish to explore, poetry has a very special place, as well as intersections with electronic music, multimedia projects and, in general, the plurality of the arts.

First project - in my room
With a title referring to Virginia Woolf’s work, A Room of One’s Own, this recital aims to highlight female creativity through three emblematic figures of the Anglo-Saxon world, namely Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke and Emily Dickinson. The desire to create new music around the latter’s texts motivated a partnership with a promising new figure in Belgian composition, Fanny Libert.
The first American female composer to achieve widespread success, Amy Beach (1867-1944) is particularly famous for her Gaelic Symphony, which is the first symphony to have been composed and published by an American woman. Her vocal music being abundant and of great finesse, the proposed selection will address the themes of love, nature and separation, with poets such as Alfred Tennyson, J. L. Stoddard, or even the texts of the composer’s husband.
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) is considered one of the most important composers of the interwar period in the United Kingdom. Best known for her chamber music with viola, her compositions for voice are real gems that are little known to our contemporaries. Writing on surprising texts, the subjects vary from unfinished romance to the tragic death of a protagonist, through myths and legends, as well as more classical scenes of everyday life, with poets such as W. B. Yeats, A. E. Housman or John Masefield.
Keen to integrate creative music into their program, the collective commissioned a cycle from the young Belgian composer and pianist Fanny Libert (2000), winner of the 2023 André Souris Prize. The work, is structured around the figure of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), an American poet who lived in total seclusion for the last twenty years of her life. Having made a selection from her poems and epistolary texts, the piece will address the themes of madness, solitude and confinement.

bottom of page