Véronique Gens

In the earlier part of her career, the French soprano Véronique Gens both benefited from and soon helped to spearhead the growing interest in the Baroque repertoire in her native country and elsewhere. She has since widened her repertoire to take in a variety of music, especially from the Classical and Romantic eras, developing a reputation both in the theater and on disc as one of the great tragediennes of our time. Gens hails from Orléans, where she was born in 1966. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where she won first prize. Her advocacy of Baroque music started with her 1986 debut with William Christie and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants, soon followed by regular dates with such specialist conductors as Marc Minkowski, René Jacobs, Christophe Rousset, and Jean-Claude Malgoire. Later, her specialization widened into accounts of music by a greater range of figures: notably Mozart, but also Gluck, Tchaikovsky, Offenbach, Berlioz, and even Verdi (Alice in Falstaff) and Wagner (Eva in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). In parallel, her career as a leading recitalist has shown her focusing on her native genre of the mélodie (French art song) while performing song from various traditions at the world’s leading concert halls. Her developing artistry has been amply displayed in her substantial discography, which covers many rarities on the Palazzetto Bru Zane label and a series of recordings exemplifying opera’s tragic heroines.