Stella Maris

Founded in 2001 by its current conductor Olivier Bardot, the Stella Maris choir brings together around fifty young singers driven by the desire to train at the highest level, in particular in the mastery of the a capella repertoire of the last two centuries.

This search for quality in the least of its interpretations allowed the Stella Maris choir to be quickly recognized by critics (Diapason, Cadences, Le Monde de la Musique), while multiplying the experiences of concerts and recordings, but also choir-school for prestigious master-classes. It is in this context that the German conductor Frieder Bernius was able to direct the choir in the motets of Johann Sebastian Bach, or that his Brazilian counterpart Celso Antunes supervised work on works by Gesualdo and Villa-Lobos.

By including different cycles of contemporary vocal music in its repertoire, the choir has been invited several times to perform in places such as the Cité de la Musique / Philharmonie (Biennale d'Art vocal), the Florilège vocal de Tours (in international competition ) or the Collège des Bernardins (world premiere with the Furians chamber orchestra). Stella Maris has notably worked with composers of our time such as Thierry Machuel, Guillaume Connesson, Morgan Jourdain, Patricia Lebrun and Anthony Girard.

After having participated in Berlioz's Te Deum at the Philharmonie de Paris in June 2015 under the direction of François-Xavier Roth, Stella Maris presented in 2016 Boreal Musik, a program of works from Northern Europe around composers like Rautavaara, Pärt, Fougstedt… This program took the singers to Finland, for a very nice tour during which Stella Maris visited the prestigious Kampin Laulu choir and gave a concert in Helsinki alongside them.

The 2016-2017 season opened with the beginnings of a fruitful collaboration with conductor Pierre-Michel Durand and his orchestra Prométhée. Together they gave Mozart's Requiem on the occasion of the opening of the Journées lyriques de la Cathédrale de Chartres and at the Lacoste lyric art festival in the Vaucluse, and took part in the Alexandre Nevski cine-concert at the Philharmonie de Paris.

In the spring of 2017, Stella Maris gave an ambitious concert around the great cantata for double choir Figure Human by Francis Poulenc, and put together a program around the Requiem by Maurice Duruflé, put into perspective with Gregorian intonations and brilliantly accompanied on the organ by Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard.

In September 2017, the choir gives, with the medievalist vocal ensemble Vox in Rama, a magnificent program around the song of birds, putting together ancient and contemporary music. The same month, he meets, at the cathedral of Chartres, Pierre-Michel Durand and the Prométhée orchestra for Rossini's Stabat Mater during the Lyric Days sponsored by Ève Ruggieri. A large and enthusiastic audience was able to hear the choir in a Christmas concert built around Britten's cantata A Boy was born in the winter of 2017.

Last April, the Stella Maris choir was the first French choir to perform, sold out, in the new Russian Orthodox cathedral at Quai Branly for two memorable interpretations of Rachmaninoff's entire Vespers, introduced by musicologist André Lischke.