Lea Desandre

The French-Italian mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, who was born in Paris in 1993, gained her first musical experience in the children’s choir of the Opéra national de Paris and received ballet lessons for 12 years. Her vocal studies led her to Sara Mingardo at the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello in Venice. She graduated in 2015 from William Christie’s vocal academy Le Jardin des Voix, with which she has also performed at Lucerne Festival. Early on, Lea Desandre won prizes at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music. The Victoires de la Musique classique named her Discovery of the Year in 2017 and Singer of the Year in 2021. Desandre regularly appears at the Salzburg Festival, where she made her debut in 2018 in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione
di Poppea, appearing in Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers in 2019 and as Despina in Mozart’s Così fan tutte in 2020-21. She has sung Idamante in Mozart’s Idomeneo at the Berlin Staatsoper and Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro in Aix-en-Provence, Zurich, Paris, and Barcelona. In 2022 she appeared as Amor in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Festival in Aix, and in the fall she will take on the part of Stéphano in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Opéra national de Paris. Lea Desandre has worked with such conductors as William Christie, Gustavo Dudamel, Laurence Equilbey, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Emmanuelle Haïm, Joana Mallwitz, Marc Minkowski, Raphaël Pichon, Christophe Rousset, and Jordi Savall. She has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikver-ein, the Berlin and Paris Philharmonics, Salzburg’s Mozarteum, and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Her first solo CD, Amazone, recorded with Ensemble Jupiter and Thomas Dunford, was released in 2021 and was named Editor’s Choice in Gramophone magazine.

June 2022