Élodie Méchain Contralto

Biography

Elodie Méchain won the Concours Voix Nouvelles singing competition in 1998. In 2000, she was proclaimed Opera Revelation of the year by Adami and then nominated for the Victoires de la Musique Classique in 2002. She regularly performs roles from the great French repertoire (Ursule in Béatrice et Bénédict, Geneviève in Pelléas et Mélisande, Anna in Les Troyens, Myrtale in Thais, the Mother, the Dragonfly and the Chinese Cup in L’Enfant et les sortilèges, and Mallika in Lakmé). She has also sung the title role in Gluck’s Orphée, Cornelia in Giulio Cesare, the Third Lady in Die Zauberflöte, a Dryad in Ariadne auf Naxos, Mrs Quickly in Falstaff, Hyppolita in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Annina in La Traviata, Grimgerde in Die Walküre, and the Musician in Manon Lescaut. She has appeared on the stages of the great French Opera houses and sung at the BBC Proms in London, the Glyndebourne Festival, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Aix Festival, the Chorégies d’Orange, and the Edinburgh Festival. Her voice is particularly suited for oratorio (Bach’s Passions and Mass in B Minor, Mozart’s Requiem and Coronation Mass, Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, and the Stabat Maters of Vivaldi Pergolèse and Dvořák). She also performed in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Lille and at the Saint-Denis Festival, Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien with Kurt Masur, Honegger’s Le Roi David in Amsterdam and Debussy’s La Damoiselle élue with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
She has recorded a CD devoted to Schubert with the pianist Maciej Pikulski. More recently, she sang in a concert version of Les Mystères d’Isis at the Salle Pleyel and appeared in Lakmé in Lausanne and at the Opéra Comique, in Guillaume Tell in Monte Carlo and at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, in a concert version of L’Enfant et les sortilèges in Paris, London and Chicago under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen.
She has also performed at Glyndebourne, Montpellier, and Monte Carlo with the Berliner Philharmoniker under the direction of Mikko Franck. She has also appeared in Fauré’s Pénélope in Strasbourg, Laks’s L’Hirondelle inattendue in Montpellier, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and in Dijon, Mozart’s Requiem in Hungary, and Pelléas et Mélisande in Chicago uder the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen…