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The Chorus

© Arno Paul

Our chorus regularly sings in the Opera’s productions and occasionally during symphonic concerts. Its vocal ranges comprise soprano and contralto for the women and tenor and bass for the men.

Costumes, makeup, wigs: our chorus members are not simply singers but also actors because with each production they need to adapt to the staging choices of the director. More often than not, they assume the roles of the crowd, the people, or guests, etc.

History of the Chorus

The Lorraine National Opera Chorus, led by Merion Powell since 2001, is comprised of 28 full-time professional singers from more than ten different countries!
The chorus distinguishes itself in both the sacred and secular repertoires and in productions of classical music, opera, operetta and world music. The Chorus has worked alongside some of the great stage directors, including Martinelli, Kokkos, Berutti and Savary as well as with renowned conductors such as Kontarsky, Weise, Valcuha, and Karabits…
The Chorus adapts to each and every project. It collaborates with some of the great orchestral ensembles including the Lorraine National Orchestra and it can also calibrate to smaller ensembles such as the Tsiganisky group as in a concert in Nancy in April 2012.
The Chorus accompanied the CCN - Lorraine Ballet for a production of Stravinsky’s Les Noces in Nancy and at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. It has collaborated with choruses from other institutions, including the Opéra-Théâtre de Metz Métropole for Caplet’s Miroir de Jésus in Metz in March 2012 and with the Dijon Opera in October 2020 for Der Traumgörge. The chorus has also appeared in other opera productions in Caen, Toulon, Rennes, Bordeaux and Montpellier.

Guillaume Fauchère, chorus master

French choral and orchestral conductor Guillaume Fauchère is currently at the helm of the Opéra national de Lorraine choir. From major opera productions to oratorios and a cappella works, he stands out for his ability to always create a particularly homogeneous and expressive sound entity.

Trained as a conductor by his teacher Mark Stringer at the prestigious Vienna University of Music and Dramatic Arts (MDW), he has worked for nearly 10 years with internationally renowned ensembles and musicians. He has conducted the Wiener Kammerorchester and the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich, taken part in master classes in Manchester, Budapest and Cannes, and worked as assistant conductor at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. He also conducts a vast repertoire on period instruments, including Bach's Christmas Oratorio, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Haydn's Nelson Mass and Handel's Messiah.

He has also premiered contemporary and post-romantic works. In 2019, conducted the premiere of a biblical opera by Austrian composer Wolfram Wagner for the Retz Festival of Sacred Music in Lower Austria, and in the same year, Mahler's 1st symphony, known as 'Titan'. At the beginning of 2020, just before the health crisis, he received public and critical acclaim for his remarkable debut in Germany when he conducted the Viennese operetta Countess Maritza by the Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán.

He gained stage experience at the highest level as a singer with the prestigious Arnold Schönberg Choir, with whom he performed from 2007 to 2014 at the Salzburg Festival, Aix-en-Provence, the Theater an der Wien, the Amsterdam Opera House and Madrid's Teatro Real, under conductors including Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle, René Jacobs and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

See also