Jean Claude Malgoire began his musical studies in his native Avignon. At the Paris Conservatoire he took first prizes in oboe and in chamber music, embarking on a brilliant career as an instrumentalist at the age of twenty, crowned by the first prize in 1968 in the Geneva International Competition. His interest in contemporary music brought a recording of music by Holliger, Castiglioni and Shinohara and in 1972 Bruno Maderna chose him as a principal in the Ensemble Européen de Musique contemporaine. He was subsquently appointed by Charles Munch as cor anglais soloist in the Orchestre de Paris. At the same time he developed his interests as a conductor and musicologist, with his first opera recordings in 1975 paving the way for engagements in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Covent Garden in London, the Paris Opéra Garnier, Karlsruhe, Palermo, and the Teatro Real in Madrid. He has more than 140 recordings to his credit, many of them of works recorded for the first time. Much of this has been brought about with the orchestra of the Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy, founded in 1966, with which he has given more than two thousand concerts throughout the world. As the head of the Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing since 1981, he has conducted operas that have twice won the prize for best opera production of the year, in 1983 with L’incoronazione di Poppea and in 1995 for the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. In addition to his interest in the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he is one of the few conductors to have explored repertoire ranging from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries. In Europe he has appeared with orchestras including the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestre National de Lille, the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National d’Île de France, and the Dresden and Kraków Philharmonic Orchestras.