Dominique Visse

Biography

An emblematic figure of the worlds of early music and Baroque opera, Dominique Visse began singing at the age of eleven when he joined the children’s choir of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
In 1976, he met Alfred Deller and became his pupil; he also studied singing with Nigel Rogers, René Jacobs, and William Christie.
His subsequent career was to develop in two main directions. In 1978 he founded the Ensemble Clément Janequin with which he has made around fifteen recordings of French polyphonic chansons and sacred pieces of the Renaissance period for harmonia mundi.
In parallel with this, he joined Les Arts Florissants a year later as singer and transcriber of manuscripts for the ensemble. Since then Dominique Visse has become one of the most active singers on the European Baroque scene, working regularly with René Jacobs, William Christie, Philippe Herreweghe, Jean-Claude Malgoire, and Ton Koopman. But his repertoire also includes Offenbach’s Les brigands and La belle Hélène and Poulenc’s Le gendarme incompris. He also took part in the premieres of Berio’s Outis at La Scala Milan, at the composer’s invitation (1996), and Pascal Dusapin’s Perelà, uomo di fumo at the Paris Opéra (2003). In the latter year he was also heard in Philippe Manoury’s La frontière at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.
Dominique Visse has taken part in some fifty recordings, most of them on the harmonia mundi label.