BIOGRAPHY
Raphaële Kennedy is a soloist and polyphonist who devotes her artistic life to the interpretation of early music and to the creation of contemporary works, with the same demand to draw out the palpitation of meaning, and the same desire to give a taste of it in order to transmit the emotion.
Recognized with Jordi Savall, François Lazarevitch and les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, Jean-Marc Aymes and Concerto soave, Guido Balestracci and l’Amoroso, Jean Tubéry and La Fenice, Vincent Beer-Demander and Compagnie VBD & Co, within A Sei Voci, European ensemble William Byrd, Les Paladins, Le Poème Harmonique, Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr…, she appears in the great festivals as well as in many recordings dedicated to the early music.
She has also become a leading figure in contemporary creation and is the dedicatee of numerous works. She has worked closely with Kaija Saariaho and Jean-Baptiste Barrière on their visual concerts, as well as with Robert Pascal. The heroine of Philippe Leroux’s opera L’Annonce faite à Marie and the title role in Laurent Cuniot’s opera L’Enfant inouï, she has also worked with Mauro Lanza, Gianvincenzo Cresta, Matteo Franceschini, Ben Foskett, Loïse Bulot and Agata Zubel. She is also the preferred interpreter of Pierre-Adrien Charpy and has begun a collaboration with electroacoustic artist Bertrand Wolff. She has performed in internationally renowned venues and festivals such as Carnegie Hall and Miller Theatre in New York, CCRMA-Stanford, UC Los Angeles Center for the Art of Performance, UC Berkeley, Lucerne Festival, Salzburger Festspiele, Integra Copenhagen, Musica Strasbourg, Présences of Radio France, Agora and Manifeste of IRCAM-Paris, les Musiques and Propagations of GMEM-Marseille, Manca of CIRM-Nice, FIMS of Fribourg, Angers-Nantes Opéra, Rennes Opera, Massy Opera, Capitole Theatre, Poitiers Auditorium Theatre…
A specialist in recitals for solo voice and electronics, she is also a regular guest artist with the ensembles tm+ (conducted by Laurent Cuniot), Ars Nova (conducted by Benoît Sitzia), Multilatérale and Les Métaboles (conducted by Léo Warynski), the Ensemble Contemporain de l’HEMU (conducted by Guillaume Bourgogne). She was a permanent member of the Jeunes Solistes and then the Solistes XXI (conducted by Rachid Safir).
She is artistic director of Da Pacem, a company dedicated to early music, contemporary creation and dialogue between cultures founded with composer Pierre-Adrien Charpy, which includes Sylvie Moquet, Marianne Muller, Virginie Descharmes, Stéphanie Paulet, Yannick Varlet, Jean-Luc Ho, Marine Sablonnière, Anne Magouët, Vincent Bouchot, Isabelle Deproit, Geoffroy Buffière, Valérie Dulac, Camilla Hoitenga, Marylise Florid, Serge Bertocchi, Anne Etienvre, Jean-Jacques Bédikian, Moussa Héma, Guilhem Lacroux and Alain Boeuf. It is within this framework – from duets to small ensembles, multidisciplinary or multimedia performances and the founding of the Avec musical and visual collection on the Cypres label – that she freely bases her work on sensuality, theatricality and rhetoric. She thus favors the incarnated transparency of the voice, the accuracy of style, the brilliance that emerges from the angle of the word and the declamatory gesture that makes the music the amplification of the word.
She has made some forty recordings, including those of Da Pacem, which have been unanimously acclaimed by the critics.
PHOTOS
Raphaële Kennedy©Alain Boeuf
Raphaële Kennedy©Isabelle Françaix
Raphaële Kennedy©Alain Anselm
Raphaële Kennedy©Anne-Marie Berthon