Christophe Dumaux |

Christophe Dumaux

French countertenor Christophe Dumos was born in 1979. He received his initial musical education in Châlons-en-Champagne in the north-east of France. Then he graduated from the Higher National Conservatory in Paris. The singer made his professional stage debut in 2002 as Eustasio in Handel’s opera Rinaldo at the Radio France Festival in Montpellier (conductor René Jacobs; a year later, a video recording of this performance was released by Harmony of the World). Since then, Dumos has worked closely with many leading ensembles and conductors – authoritative interpreters of early music, including “Les Arts Florissants” and “Le Jardin des Voix” under the direction of William Christie, “Le Concert d’Astrée” under the direction of Emmanuelle Aim, the Amsterdam “Combattimento Consort” under the direction of Jan Willem de Vrind, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and others.

In 2003, Dumos made his debut in the United States, performing at the Festival of Two Worlds in Charleston (South Carolina) as Tamerlane in Handel’s opera of the same name. In subsequent years, he received engagements from many prestigious theaters, including the National Opera in Paris, the Royal Theater “La Monnaie” in Brussels, the Santa Fe Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the An der Wien Theater in Vienna, the National opera on the Rhine in Strasbourg and others. His performances graced the programs of the Glyndebourne Festival in the UK and the Handel Festival in Göttingen. The basis of the singer’s repertoire is the parts in Handel’s operas Rodelinda, Queen of the Lombards (Unulfo), Rinaldo (Eustasio, Rinaldo), Agrippina (Otto), Julius Caesar (Ptolemy), Partenope (Armindo), the main roles in “Tamerlane”, “Roland”, “Sosarme, King of the Media”, as well as Otto in “The Coronation of Poppea” by Monteverdi), Giuliano in “Heliogabal” by Cavalli) and many others. In concert programs, Christophe Dumos performs works of the cantata-oratorio genre, including “Messiah” and “Dixit Dominus” by Handel, “Magnificat” and Bach’s cantatas. The singer has repeatedly taken part in productions of contemporary operas, among them Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice at the An der Wien Theater in Vienna, Pascal Dusapin’s Mediematerial at the Lausanne Opera and Bruno Mantovani’s Akhmatova at the Bastille Opera in Paris.

In 2012, Christophe Dumos will make his first appearance at the Salzburg Festival as Ptolemy in Handel’s Julius Caesar. In 2013 he will perform the same part at the Metropolitan Opera, then at the Zurich Opera and at the Paris Grand Opera. Dumos is scheduled to make his debut at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in Cavalli’s Calisto in 2014.

Based on press materials of the Moscow International House of Music