Jean-Paul Lécot

Jean-Paul Lécot

Born in 1947 in Provins (Seine-et-Marne), Jean-Paul Lécot studied at the Toulouse Conservatoire with Xavier Darasse, from whom he inherited a passionate interest in many areas of music. 

He has made a dozen or so CD recordings devoted to the organ: compositions by Marin Marais, Lully, Charpentier (2 CDs), Rameau (2 CDs), François Couperin (Concerts Royaux and Pièces de Clavecin), Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (“Mozart père et fils”), Royer, Leclair and Couperin (“Chaconnes et autres Folies Françoises”), and works played on the Renaissance organ of Saint-Savin-en-Lavedan, and on the Cavaillé-Coll (Romantic period) of theBasilica of Our Lady of the Rosary in Lourdes. All of them have received much critical acclaim, with high ratings in the specialised press (Le Monde de la Musique, Diapason, Classica, Res Musica…).

Jean-Paul Lécot has published many works in France (notably with La Sinfonie d’Orphée), Switzerland, Italy and Germany. They include restorations of early works, including motets, and more than seven hundred transcriptions for organ of works dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century (the latter including ones by Stravinsky and Messiaen). He has also orchestrated works by composers incuding Beethoven and Liszt.

To texts by Jacqueline Frédéric Frié of the Académie Mallarmé, he has composed seven cantatas and a vast oratorio for 8 soloists, double choir and orchestra (performed in Paris at Notre Dame). His Cantate des Béatitudes, recorded at the Festival d’Art Sacré in Paris, was released on CD by Agorila in 2019. 

He is maître de chapelle and organist of the Sanctuaries of Our Lady of Lourdes (five instruments) and he plays an active part in the revival of French liturgical music: almost five hundred vocal pieces and over a thousand psalm settings. He also composed Christ hier, Christ aujourd’hui, the official anthem of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, which was translated into twenty-seven languages. 

For twenty years he was artistic director of the Lourdes International Festival of Sacred Music, in which many of the finest French and European ensembles have taken part. 

Jean-Paul Lécot was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture in 1997, and the same year John Paul II appointed him a member of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon (“virtuosi” meaning “artists of great merit”).