MICHÈLE LOSIER kicks into HIGH GEAR
Canadian mezzo-soprano Michèle Losier’s recent assumptions of major roles have consistently been intellectually rich, emotionally committed and vocally enthralling, earning her the highest accolades.
Of Losier’s May 2019 Idamante at La Scala, Der Opern Freund wrote of the artist’s “pleasant timbre and well-formed technique,” noting that she “was physically and gesturally a perfect, aristocratic youth,” and that she expressed the character’s “every nuance of emotion.”
In December 2019, when Losier appeared at Brussels’s La Monnaie as Nicklausse and the Muse in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s new production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Opera Traveller said she possessed “a remarkably energetic stage presence,” with a “ripe, juicy mezzo … with a wonderfully full, rich bottom” and that she “savoured the language, bringing out a world of colours through the text.”
Other recent assignments for Losier have included, in 2017–18, Angelina in La Cenerentola in Lyon, Giovanna Seymour in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena for the Opera National de Bordeaux and in the autumn of 2019, the lead in Bizet’s Carmen in Copenhagen.
From that repertoire to the title role in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier might seem quite the leap, and yet, in February 2020, when Losier first performed Octavian at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, she received ardent cheers and applause from the Berlin audience along with appreciative reviews.
Writing for , for example, critic G.J. Dowler said that Losier “struck a wholly credible, Jan Brachmann praised to the skies Losier’s colleagues—among them Camilla Nylund, Nadine Sierra and Gunther Groissböck—then said: “Her passionate Octavian alternately light and darkly glowing, Michele Losier is the discovery of the evening.”
