The French musician has built an unusual career around the traverso, while refusing to limit herself to a single instrument. At 29, Gabrielle Rubio is already a familiar presence among some of Europe’s leading early-music ensembles — and is increasingly developing projects of her own.
For many young musicians, specialisation comes early. Gabrielle Rubio has followed almost the opposite path.
Born in Perpignan in 1997, the French musician grew up simultaneously playing the flute and classical guitar before discovering the traverso — the Baroque predecessor of the modern transverse flute — at the age of 11. Rather than eventually choosing between those musical worlds, she kept them together.
That decision has come to define an unusually versatile career. Rubio plays traverso and modern flute, but also theorbo, Baroque guitar and classical guitar, moving between wind and plucked-string instruments and between the roles of soloist, orchestral musician and continuo player.
Her musical education reflects that curiosity. After studying at the Conservatoire de Perpignan, Rubio entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris while still in her teens, ultimately completing master’s degrees in both classical guitar and traverso. She later expanded her exploration of historically informed performance by studying theorbo and Baroque guitar at the Conservatoire de Versailles.
The traverso, however, has become central to her professional life.
Rubio has performed with many of the ensembles that have shaped the European early-music scene in recent decades, among them Les Arts Florissants, Pygmalion, Les Talens Lyriques, Le Concert de la Loge, Ensemble Correspondances and Concerto Köln. She has worked under conductors including William Christie, Paul Agnew, Raphaël Pichon, Christophe Rousset and Julien Chauvin, while also appearing as a soloist with the Leipziger Barockorchester, Le Songe du Roi and Le Concert de la Loge.
An international breakthrough came in 2021, when she won First Prize in the National Flute Association’s Baroque Flute Artist Competition. She subsequently reached the final of the International Telemann Competition in Magdeburg.
But Rubio’s trajectory is becoming particularly interesting beyond the conventional progression of competitions and appearances with established ensembles.
She was selected by the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles for the fourth edition of Lab’baroque, a two-year programme designed to allow emerging musicians to develop their own artistic projects around French Baroque music.
Rubio has used the residency to investigate the French repertoire for traverso and basso continuo, approaching composers including Michel de La Barre, Jacques-Martin Hotteterre and members of the Philidor family. The project has involved not only concerts but experimentation with instrumentation, transcription and different ways of presenting the repertoire.
One of the resulting programmes, Airs et Songes de la Traversière, was presented at the Royal Chapel of Versailles in February 2025, with Rubio joined by viola da gamba, theorbo and harpsichord.
There is something particularly appropriate about this repertoire for a musician whose identity has developed on both sides of the traditional division between melody and accompaniment. Playing the traverso requires an intensely physical relationship with breath and phrasing; the theorbo and guitar place Rubio inside the harmonic architecture supporting that melodic line.
That dual perspective may help explain why her multi-instrumentalism feels less like a collection of additional skills than a way of understanding the music she performs.
Rubio is also one of the founding members of Ensemble Marilou, a group of five multi-instrumentalists devoted to music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Alongside performing, she teaches traverso at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés.
In 2026, another distinction brought her growing profile into focus: she was selected as one of the Talents Adami Classique, the French organisation’s programme supporting emerging classical musicians.
Rubio belongs to a generation of early-music performers for whom historically informed performance is no longer primarily about recovering a forgotten repertoire. The foundations laid by several generations of specialists are already there. The challenge is increasingly what younger musicians choose to do with them.
In Rubio’s case, the answer seems to lie in curiosity: moving between instruments, ensembles and musical functions while looking more closely at a repertoire whose apparent familiarity can conceal unexplored possibilities.
At 29, she has already spent years playing alongside some of Europe’s foremost Baroque musicians. The more intriguing part of her career may be beginning now, as she starts to turn that experience into an artistic voice recognisably her own.Where to find Gabrielle Rubio
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