The French-Italian mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre received the Opus Klassik as Singer of the Year in 2022 and the Prix de la Critique as Musical Personality of the Year in 2024. She appears worldwide at leading opera and concert venues.
Highlights of the 2025/26 season have included a series of role debuts: the title role of Handel’s Theodora on tour with Ensemble Jupiter under Thomas Dunford, Mélisande in a new production of Pelléas et Mélisande in Monte Carlo and Sesto in a new production of La clemenza di Tito in Zurich. She also returned to the Paris Opéra in her signature role of Cherubino (Le nozze di Figaro). In concert she has appeared in several programmes with Thomas Dunford and Ensemble Jupiter, including a European tour to mark the release of her new album Songs of Passion. She has continued her residency as part of the ‘Junge Wilde’ series at the Konzerthaus Dortmund with a song recital, and throughout the season was also artist in residence at Bozar in Brussels.
In recent seasons she has enjoyed operatic successes in the title role of Charpentier’s Médée at the Paris Opéra, and as Idamante (Idomeneo), Handel’s Ariodante, Rosina (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Dido (Dido and Aeneas), Urbain (Les Huguenots), Stéphano (Roméo et Juliette), Poppea in Handel’s Agrippina, Sapho, Iphise and Eglé in Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé and Timna in Rameau’s Samson.
In 2018 she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival, where she has returned every year since, including as Amore and Valletto (L’incoronazione di Poppea), Vénus (Orphée aux enfers), Despina (Così fan tutte), Cherubino, in the Vivaldi pasticcio Hotel Metamorphosis, as Annio in a concert performance of La clemenza di Tito and in several concerts.
Lea Desandre has a particular fondness for chamber music and has presented her diverse projects on tour in the USA, Canada, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and throughout Europe, appearing at major music venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Berlin State Opera, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and the Wigmore Hall in London.
Her chamber music partners include Alexandre Kantorow (piano) and Thomas Dunford (lute), and she has collaborated with conductors including Gustavo Dudamel, John Eliot Gardiner, William Christie, Myung-Whun Chung, Joana Mallwitz, Thomas Dunford and Raphaël Pichon.
Lea Desandre studied with Sara Mingardo in Venice and was selected to join William Christie’s academy Le Jardin des Voix in 2015. In 2017 she was named ‘Revelation of the Year’ at the Victoires de la Musique Classique.
