Valentine Michaud
saxophone
Vita
The French saxophonist Valentine Michaud, winner of the 2020 Credit Suisse Young Artist Award, was born in Paris in 1993 and grew up in Nantes. She began taking lessons on her instrument at the age of eight with Slava Kazykin. At 16, she commenced studies with Pierre-Stéphane Meugé in Lausanne, and from 2015 to 2018 she participated in Lars Mlekusch’s master class at the Zurich University of the Arts. Valentine Michaud also studied musicology at the Sorbonne in Paris, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2013 and earning a master’s degree in music education in 2015. She has won numerous competitions, including the prestigious Andrejs Jurjāns International Woodwind Competition in Riga in 2016 and the Prix Credit Suisse Jeunes Solistes in 2017. Her duo Akmi with Lithuanian pianist Akvilė Šileikaitė has also garnered distinctions: most recently, the Swiss Ambassador Award in 2019. Michaud is particularly interested in cross-disciplinary projects. She is a founding member of the collective SIBJA, which combines painting, dance, music, and live electronics. Her role in Anders Hillborg’s Peacock Tales, the saxophone version of which she premieres tonight, extends to acting and dancing. Concerts featuring repertoire that ranges from Baroque to modern have taken Michaud to
London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, Zurich’s Tonhalle, and Geneva’s Victoria Hall, as well as to New York, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. She has performed with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev and the Orchestre des Continents under Thierry Fischer and made her debut with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 2021, with Vassily Petrenko conducting. She is also a member of the Ever Present Orchestra. Michaud attaches particular importance to collaborating with contemporary composers, as she wishes to continually enrich the repertoire for her instrument.
Lucerne Festival debut on 17 August 2017 as part of the “Debut” series in a program of works by Denisov, Hindemith, Schulhoff, and Albright.
July 2022
Magazine
