Warner Classics has signed an exclusive recording contract with young French talent Marie Oppert, who will release her debut album Enchantée! in March 2020. The high-spirited program will form a bridge between French and English musical theatre.
Oppert was born in 1997 and began her music studies at an early age, training in vocal technique, choir, music theory, piano, clarinet, and dance. Her first stage experiences included the national tour of The Adventures of Pinocchio at the age of 10 and the Théâtre du Châtelet’s production of The Sound of Music at the age of 12. After becoming the youngest-ever recipient of a Fulbright grant, she attended Marymount Manhattan College in New York and earned a Bachelor of Arts specialized in musical theatre.
In 2014, Oppert obtained her breakout role on stage alongside Natalie Dessay and under the musical direction of Michel Legrand, where she performed the lead role of Genevieve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. A DVD of this production was released by Warner Classics & Erato in 2015. She has gone on to star in prominent roles of the musical theatre and operetta genres, including amongst others Sweeney Todd, My Fair Lady, Les Mousquetaires au couvent, and Wonderland: A New Alice. She has also created her own cabaret shows in Paris.
“From my childhood days I’ve been absolutely passionate about musical theatre, which I discovered while taking my first steps on the stage,” says Oppert. “It’s a genre whose ‘magical power’ to tell a story through theatre, song and dance I find utterly compelling.”
In her debut album, she embraces both the classics of Broadway repertoire and treasured songs of French origin, in order to represent her own musical upbringing and passion. The program explores the idea of this celebrated magical place “where it’s possible for dreams to come true”, tracing it from Anastasia’s “Journey to the Past”, through a bilingual version of the title song of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, through Willy Wonka’s “Pure Imagination”, to George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”.
Oppert is joined by the Orchestre National de Lille and conductor Nicholas Skilbeck in the recording, and in two separate tracks she reunites with Natalie Dessay and Melissa Errico, whom she affectionately calls “my two Franco-American ‘fairy godmothers’.”
