Taking its inspiration from Les Nations, a work by François Couperin symbolising the coming together of musical tastes and heralding a “European artistic space” which, far from being a recent invention, bears all the hallmarks of the Age of Enlightenment, Le Concert des Nations, the youngest of the ensembles directed by Jordi Savall, was founded in 1989. Created during the preparation of the Canticum Beatae Virgine by Charpentier, this group arose out of the need for an orchestra of period instruments that could play the orchestral and symphonic repertoire from the Baroque to the Romantic periods (1600-1850).