Lucile Richardot

Biography

Equally at home in madrigals as in solo repertoire, as well as being a committed Early Music champion, she discovered singing as a child in her hometown of Épinal and initially pursued a career in journalism.
Having subsequently trained with the Maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Paris, then in Early Music at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional in Paris, she embraces all eras and musical styles, on the concert platform as on the operatic stage. She has notably sung with Il Seminario Musicale, Le Poème Harmonique, Les Paladins, Solistes XXI, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Collegium 1704, Het Collectief, Il Giardino Armonico, The English Concert, Le Concert de la Loge, Les Accents, Les Surprises, Faenza, the Orchestre National de France, and she performs regularly with Correspondances, Pygmalion, Les Arts Florissants, Pulcinella, Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, and Acte 6...
She also devises sparkling recital programmes with harpsichordists Jean-Luc Ho and Philippe Grisvard, as well as with pianists Anne de Fornel and Adam Laloum.
Invited to perform at venues from Rotterdam to Toronto via London, Liverpool, Amsterdam, Prague, Hamburg, Wrocław, Madrid, and Boston, she is a regular presence at the Opéra de Rouen, the Théâtre de Caen, the Opéra-Comique, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and she has been applauded at La Fenice in Venice, Carnegie Hall in New York, and La Scala in Milan. She also takes on such roles as the Messagiera, Penelope, Arnalta, Juno and Ino, the Sorceress and Spirit, Cornelia, Circé (Desmarest), Goffredo, and La Pythonisse (the Witch of Endor), but also Geneviève (Debussy), Queen Gertrude (Ambroise Thomas), Mescalina (Ligeti), and the long-awaited Madame de Croissy in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites earlier this year in Rouen. Before venturing next into Tchaikovsky (Iolanta in Rouen) and Ponchielli (La Gioconda at the Teatro Real in Madrid), she returns to the Salzburg Festival this summer.
She approaches with relish the music of Mahler, Berlioz, Stravinsky, and Poulenc, notably under the batons of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, François-Xavier Roth, Louis Langrée, Reinbert de Leeuw, and Susanna Mälkki, along with the major Baroque works led by Paul Agnew, Philippe Jaroussky, Raphaël Pichon, and Sébastien Daucé.
Her first solo album, “Perpetual Night” with Correspondances, released in 2018 by harmonia mundi, received a host of international awards and partly inspired the performance piece “Songs”, staged by Samuel Achache. Also for harmonia mundi, in 2021 she recorded the album “Berio To Sing” in collaboration with Geoffroy Jourdain and Les Cris de Paris; and in early 2023, accompanied by Anne de Fornel, she released the first complete recording of the songs of Nadia and Lili Boulanger, “Les heures claires”—a 3-CD set that is now a new benchmark.
2025 marks the release of her latest solo album, again in collaboration with Correspondances, “Northern Light” (a Scandinavian pendant to “Perpetual Night”), and she has just been voted “opera singer of the year” at the Victoires de la Musique Classique.