Tenor
Lyric singer (tenor), actor, director and drama teacher. Damien Bigourdan is a graduate of the Cours Florent (1998) and the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique (2001).
In 2001, he created the role of Paul in Au monde comme n’y étant pas by Olivier Py at the Conservatoire. The poet and director then cast him in his production of Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de Satin. Olivier Py is to engage him again in theater, but also in opera (Aeschylus’s Orestia in 2009, Massenet’s Manon in 2018, conducted by Marc Minkowski) and in the premieres of his own works (L’Amour vainqueur in 2019, Pur Présent in 2019, Hamlet à l’impératif! in 2021, Ma Jeunesse exaltée in 2022).
His voice work was encouraged by Piero Weitz, who gave him his first lessons in 2002. He then continued with Florence Guignolet, Christiane Patard and Henry Runey.
Since then, he has sung roles in a wide variety of repertoires: Canio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Turiddu in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, Luigi and Rinuccio in Puccini’s Il Trittico, Gounod’s Faust, Paul in Philip Glass’s Les Enfants Terribles, and the tenor soloist in Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Fritz/Le Brésilien in Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne, Orin Scrivello in Little Shop of Horrors, Porcus in Honneger’s Jeanne d’Arc au Bucher, Theseus in Dove’s The Monster in the Maze, Alfredo in Verdi’s La Traviata de Verdi….
He is also very familiar with the operetta repertoire. Piero Weitz directs him in a triptyc of works by Hervé between 2015 and 2021 (Les chevaliers de la table ronde, Mam’zelle Nitouche and V’lan dans l’œil).
Damien Bigourdan performs notably at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, at the Opéra-Comique, at the Salzburg Festival, at the Festival d’Aix en Provence… And works with conductors such as Maxime Pascal, Sir Simon Rattle… and directors such as Benjamin Lazar, Valérie Lesort and Chrisitan Hecq…
Since 2010, Damien Bigourdan has been a member of the musical ensemble Le Balcon, which has already entrusted him with several roles, including Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Der Tanzmeister and Scaramuccio in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In 2013, with the same ensemble, he won 1st prize at the Stockhausen Kurses in Kürten for the role of Michael in Examen by Karlheinz Stockhausen. He also staged Peter Eötvös’s Le Balcon, singing the role of Roger at the Opéra de Lille. In 2018, he sings Michael in Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht, conducted by Maxime Pascal and directed by Benjamin Lazar at the Opéra-Comique, revived at the Philharmonie de Paris.
In 2023-2024, he embodies Le Lépreux in Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise under the baton of Maxime Pascal at the Festival Enescu, he is be back as Alfredo in La Traviata at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, and is the Hunchback in Richard Strauss’s The Woman without a Shadow at the Opéra du Capitole de Toulouse.
He also taught acting at the Cours Florent from 2007 to 2015.
