ÍøÆغÚÁÏ

English soprano Felicity Lott began her musical studies on the violin and piano, but she did not entertain the idea of a musical career until after completing a degree in French at the Royal Holloway College. Having studied voice during college, she auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music and spent the next four years there. Her debut came in London as Seleuce in Handel's Tolomeo, but she first came to public attention in 1975 when she stepped in as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte at the English National Opera, where she also sang Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace and Roxane in Szymanowski's King Roger. In 1976 at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, she continued this thread of modern opera in Henze's We Come to the River and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The following year, she sang Anne Trulove in The Rake's Progress at Glyndebourne and Jennifer in Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage at the Welsh National Opera. Perhaps even more important was singing the Countess in Strauss' Capriccio for the Glyndebourne Touring Company; this was the first of many Strauss roles she was to make her own.

Lott also undertook roles from the standard repertory, including Poppea in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, and Xiphares in Mitridate, rè di Ponto. She had great success in French opera, especially as Charpentier's Louise, Blanche in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites and the Woman in La voix humaine. She eventually added more Strauss roles to her repertoire, including both Octavian and the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, Christine in Intermezzo and Arabella. She has sung at all of the major opera houses around the world, including Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco, the Metropolitan, Hamburg, Dresden, Vienna, Paris Opera, and Munich. Her Mozart roles have remained central in her performing schedule.

Lott is also very active as a recitalist. She is one of the original members of the Songmaker's Almanac, a group created by pianist Graham Johnson to explore all areas of song literature. She and Richard Jackson have been admired for their performances of Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch. She is also well known for her interpretations of the songs of Francis Poulenc and has recorded nearly all of the songs appropriate for female voice. Her performances of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben and Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder are also highly acclaimed. Her recital programs are unusually varied, often contain little-known pieces, and are much anticipated by audiences. She also appears regularly with major orchestras around the world. Her concert repertoire includes the second and fourth symphonies of Mahler, the oratorios of Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, and, of course, the Four Last Songs of Strauss.

When Felicity Lott began performing, her voice was a medium-sized lyric soprano with a strong lower register. As she has matured, the voice has taken on darker hues that have enabled her to be able to fulfill all of the demands of the great Strauss operas for which she is justly famous. She has excellent control of the entire dynamic range and a wonderful feel for the long phrases of Mozart and Strauss. She is an excellent actress and is careful to create a complete character in her performances.

Through the new decade, she continued performing, including a 2004 appearance in Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein at the Chatelet in Paris. Her later recordings covered Schubert (2010), Elgar (2011), and Mahler (2011), among others.

Lott is married to actor Gabriel Woolf. She became a Commander of the British Empire in 1990 and was knighted as a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1996.

As he gradually moved away from leading roles, Michel Sénéchal has established himself as a star among comprimario singers. His vignettes, however brief, are of an order that instantly raises the artistic level in any production he chooses to embrace. His sophisticated sense of makeup, stage movement, comic timing, and seizing each element of irony and rendering it unforgettable all are built upon the underpinnings of a handsome light tenor voice, well-trained and always pleasant to hear. So dominant has this supporting artist become, the catalog reveals multiple recordings of his core repertory. His only predecessor to have achieved such prominence in this specialized niche was Swiss tenor Hughes Cuenod, an indelible artist himself, but one with a even lighter instrument.

Following studies at the Paris Conservatory, Sénéchal made his debut in 1950 at La Monnaie in Brussels. Under contract there for three seasons, he sang the lyric tenor repertory, as he continued to do later at both the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique and in other theaters through France. His roles grew to include Rossini's Almaviva and Comte Ory, Hylas in Berlioz's Les Troyens, Paolino in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto, Georges Brown in Boieldieu's La dame blanche, and three of Mozart's leading tenor parts: Tamino, Ferrando, and Don Ottavio. At Aix-en-Provence in 1956, Sénéchal sang the travesty role of Rameau's Platée, a curious creature of heart-stopping homeliness who believes herself to be beautiful. The role is both a leading one and a character study. His success in the role was so great, he was called upon to perform the part in Amsterdam, at the Monnaie, and later, the Opéra-Comique.

Steadily, Sénéchal established his supremacy in character roles, undertaking Monsieur Triquet in Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin (recorded with Solti); Schmidt in Werther; Trabuco in Verdi's La forza del destino; Scaramuccio in Ariadne auf Naxos; Erice in Cavalli's L'Ormindo; Valzacchi, Teapot, and Arithmetic in Ravel's enchanted L'enfant et les Sortileges; Gonzalve in Ravel's L'heure Espagnole (triumphantly sung at the 1966 Glyndebourne Festival with a cast including Hughes Cuenod as Torquemada); Rodriguez in Don Quichotte; the Brahmin in Roussel's exotic Padmâvatî; as well as Le Dancaire and Don Basilio, which he sang annually at the Salzburg Festival beginning in 1972. Sénéchal was chosen for the role of Don Jerome when Prokofiev's rarely performed Betrothal in a Monastery was produced at Strasbourg in 1973.

For Sénéchal's Metropolitan Opera debut on March 8, 1982, he was engaged for Les Contes d'Hoffmann, performing the four comic tenor roles, a turn that by then had all but become a signature assignment. Other roles following at the Metropolitan were Guillot in Massenet's Manon and Mozart's Don Basilio. Sénéchal has, in addition to established repertory stage works, undertaken contemporary operas. At Toulouse, he sang Fabien in the premiere of Marcel Landowski's Montségur in 1985. The same year, he appeared as Pope Leo X in Boehmer's Docktor Faustus at the Paris Opéra.

Sénéchal's mastery of the tenor character repertory has repeatedly brought him into the recording studio. His four comic characters in Hoffmann have been preserved on disc three times, while in James Levine's recording of Andrea Chénier, Sénéchal appears together with his greatly respected Italian counterpart, Piero di Palma, and supporting principals Scotto, Domingo, and Milnes. In addition to Offenbach's Hoffmann and a near-definitive Orphée aux enfers recorded under Plasson in 1978, Sénéchal appears with Dame Felicity Lott in a recording of La belle Hélène released in 2000.

French tenor Yann Beuron studied voice at the Paris Conservatoire as a pupil of Anna Maria Mondi, and graduated in 1996. Among the roles he has performed are Belmonte in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Opéra national du Rhin in 1995, and Arcas and Mercury in Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in 1996. He has also sung the roles of Orpheus in Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers, Pelléas in Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande, Fridolin XXIV in Offenbach's Le roi Carotte, Paris in La belle Hélène, Idamante in Mozart's Idomeneo, Tito in La clemenza di Tito, Pylade in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, Gonsalve in Ravel's L'heure espagnole, and Chevalier de la Force in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. He has appeared at many European opera houses, including Teatro Real in Madrid, Liceu Opera Barcelona, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Opéra de Lyon, the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Paris Opéra, and Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Beuron has also sung in concert with orchestras in France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and he has recorded on Alpha, Timpani, Ediciones Singulares, and Opera Rara. ~ Blair Sanderson

Conductor Marc Minkowski is best known as the founder and longtime director of Les Musiciens du Louvre, a pioneering French Baroque ensemble that has also proven one of the field's most durable. He has also conducted music of the Classical and Romantic periods, often unearthing and shaping performances of forgotten works.

Minkowski was born in Paris on October 4, 1962. His father was a pediatrics professor and a founder of the field of neonatology; his mother came from the U.S. Minkowski began his career as a bassoonist and soon became interested in the growing field of historical performance, performing with such leading groups of the day as Les Arts Florissants, the Ricercar Consort, and the Clemencic Consort. He studied conducting with Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School in Hancock, Maine, and returned to Europe determined to apply what he had learned to early music. In 1982, he founded Les Musiciens du Louvre, one of the first instrumental groups to specialize in the French Baroque, and he got a boost when he won the first International Early Music Competition in Bruges, Belgium, two years later. Under Minkowski, the orchestra has premiered unusual works in both the operatic and instrumental fields, such as Marin Marais' Alcyone, Jean-Joseph Mouret's Les amours de Ragonde, and Jean-Baptiste Lully's Phaëton. He has also been associated with the revival of several neglected operas of Handel. Beginning in the late '80s, Minkowski began recording with Les Musiciens du Louvre for many years on the Erato label and later for Archiv Produktion. His recorded repertory focused on little-known Baroque works, but he also recorded perennial favorites, such as Handel's Water Music, in 1998.

Les Musiciens du Louvre moved to the city of Grenoble in 1996 and became associates of the Maison de la Culture de Grenoble. Minkowski remains the ensemble's conductor, but in the second part of his career, his interests have grown to include music of the Classical and Romantic eras. He was ahead of most other historically inclined conductors who have taken this career turn. Minkowski has unearthed little-known works such as Grétry's La Caravane du Caire and, in 2013, he conducted a recording of Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer, paired with a little-known setting of a condensed version of the Wagner libretto by Pierre-Louis-Philippe Dietsch. He has a distinguished record as a guest conductor with top-flight orchestras, including the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Staatskapelle Dresden, among others. On the Naïve label, he began to record 19th century music, including a cycle of Schubert's symphonies in 2012 and several of the operas of Jacques Offenbach. In 2020, Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre released a recording of Mozart's Mass in C minor, K. 427, on the PentaTone label. In the 2020s, he has worked with the Baroque specialty labels Château de Versailles (on 2022's Rameau: Nouvelle Symphonie) and Palazzetto Bru Zane (on Meyebeer's opera Robert le Diable, with the Orchestra National Bordeaux Aquitaine the same year). His catalog of recordings comprises more than 70 items. ~ James Manheim