The French conductor and pianist Alphonse Cemin has a wide-ranging repertory and a strong affinity with vocal music — from opera to classical song to folk music. He is especially sought after to work in bel canto repertory and contemporary music.
In the 2024/25 season he has conducted George Benjamin’s Picture a Day Like This at the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg, I Capuleti e i Montecchi for English Touring Opera and Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître on a European tour, including performances at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and the BBC Proms. Future projects include performances with the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, a new production of Britten’s Curlew River directed by Silvia Costa and Orphée et Eurydice directed by Lorraine de Sagazan at the opera houses of Nantes and Rennes.
Highlights in recent seasons have included I puritani with the Athens State Orchestra, La Cenerentola at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris and at the Opéra de Rouen, Iphigénie en Tauride at the Opéra national de Nancy-Lorraine, Rameau’s Les Indes galantes and Tomás Bordalejo’s Bureau 470 at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill at Paris’s Théâtre de l’Athénée and the Opéra de Lille.
Alphonse Cemin’s conducting career evolved from his long experience as a vocal coach and musical assistant, working with great names such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kent Nagano, George Benjamin and Marc Minkowski, and appearing at the Salzburg Festival, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Bavarian State Opera and the Opéra Comique in Paris.
Together with his friend and musical partner Maxime Pascal he founded the renowned ensemble Le Balcon. He is also musical director of Les Lundis Musicaux at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, in which role he has programmed performances by artists such as Felicity Lott, Christoph Prégardien, Sandrine Piau, Michael Spyres, Laurent Naouri, Konstantin Krimmel, Julius Drake and Malcolm Martineau.
