The Curious Bards

Ilektra Platiopoulou began her vocal training with V. Tsampali at the Neo Conservatory in Salonica, before being admitted to the Schola Cantorum in Basel with Rosa Dominguez and Andreas Scholl. She received her master's degree in early music there in 2009, and the following year joined Marcel Boone's class at the Musik Akademie in Basel to further develop her vocal technique and her knowledge of the operatic repertoire. That same year, she was also a semi-finalist in the Cesti Competition (Innsbruck, Austria). In 2011, she sang the part of Virtu in Claudio Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea at the Athens National Opera (dir: M. Chryssikos, staging: A. Papadamaki). In 2013, she gave a recital of Manuel De Falla's Chansons Espagnoles with the Basel National Orchestra, followed by a month-long tour of Japan as a soloist. 

The year 2014 was very important for her young career, with her first title role in Maurice Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (dir: R. Garza, staging: Barbora Horakova-Joly) at the Basel National Opera. That same year she was also selected to sing the role of Lucilla (La Scala di Seta by Gioacchino Rossini) as part of the Rossini Residence at the Académie du Festival d'art lyrique d'Aix en Provence. In 2015, she sang the part of Marianna in Rossini's Il Signor Bruschino (dir: Yi-Chen Lin, staging: C. Desderi) at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The same year, she was selected to take part in the workshop Il viaggio a Reims by Rossini, with director Stephan Grögler, at the Fondation Royaumont. She is very interested in the links between traditional and learned music, and explores these relationships in the Greek repertoire of composers such as Theodorakis and Hadjidakis, and in early Gaelic music with the ensemble The Curious Bards, who invited her to appear on their first recording released by Harmonia Mundi (autumn 2017). In 2017, in Macau (China) and Hong Kong, she sang the role of Giunone in the Concert Royal de la Nuit recreated by Sébastien Daucé and his Ensemble Correspondances. She will reprise this role, directed by Francesca Lattuada, in autumn 2017 in Caen, Versailles, Grenoble, Dijon, Toulouse, and Compiègne. She also had the opportunity to be a guest on the ensemble's first recording ‘The Curious Bards’ released by Harmonia Mundi (autumn 2017). She had the privilege of performing Francis Poulenc's La Voix humaine in October 2018, for the first performance of this work in Greece, with the National Orchestra of Thessaloniki (dir. Ph.Forget) in collaboration with the National Theatre of Greece. 

Her forthcoming projects for 2019 and 2020 include the revival of Ballet Royal de la Nuit with Ensemble Correspondances at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Théâtre de Luxembourg, Opéra de Nancy, Opéra de Rouen and Opéra de Versailles, as well as several recitals with pianist Alphonse Cemin.

November 2021