Nicole Corti
President of the IWF
Conductor and choir director Nicole Corti is also a passionate and accomplished teacher. This dual vocation permeates the whole of her career, which is largely focused on the voice through the contemporary repertoire and the great works of the sacred repertoire.
Nicole Corti was the first woman to be accepted into the conducting class at the Lyon Conservatoire, and her encounters with conductors Sergiu Celibidache and Pierre Devaux, ethnomusicologist Yvette Grimaud, and composer and organist Raffi Ourgandjian, among others, were fundamental to her musical approach.
In 1981, she founded the Britten Choir, and with this ensemble achieved international renown through numerous concerts in Europe and the United States. Each of these concerts was an opportunity for Nicole Corti to showcase her proposals, particularly in terms of sound colour.
It is this very special approach that has encouraged a number of composers to write for the ensemble and to contribute to its original and audacious programmes.
In 1993, Nicole Corti was appointed head of the choir at Notre-Dame de Paris. She expanded the concert programme there, favouring music from the 20th and 21st centuries while conducting the great works of the Romantic and oratorio repertoires (Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, etc.).
In 2008, she became head of the only choral conducting class at the national conservatoires in Lyon, where she is committed to training the next generation of professional choral conductors. Working with a number of renowned orchestras, she is responsible for preparing the choirs: the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, conducted by John Nelson (Bach’s Passions and Mass in B, Berlioz’s Enfance du Christ, etc.), the Orchestre National de Lyon for Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé conducted by Emmanuel Krivine, and most recently alongside Leonard Slatkin as part of the Orchestre National de Lyon’s complete Ravel programme for a concert at the Salle Pleyel and a recording to be released by Naxos.
Convinced of the need to present the major works of the choral repertoire, and drawing on the experience she has gained with the Britten Choir in working with complex and demanding music, Nicole Corti has begun work on the great sacred works of Bach, conducting in particular Bach’s Mass in B, St John Passion, St Matthew Passion and Magnificat.
Her discography includes critically acclaimed recordings, notably Duruflé’s Requiem with the Maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Paris (Choc du Monde de la musique), André Caplet’s Miroir de Jésus with the Britten Choir (5 Diapasons) and a selection of works by Jean-Louis Florentz (Diapason d’or). She has also recorded Ohana, Procaccioli, Pascal, Ourgandjian (E.V.B.B.), Jean-Pierre Leguay’s Missa Deo gratias, En l’honneur de sainte Anne (works by Joseph-Guy Ropartz) and Édith Canat de Chizy’s Livre d’heures, all three for the Hortus label. The quality of Nicole Corti’s work has twice been recognized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ Liliane Bettencourt Prize (in 2002 with the Maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Paris and in 2010 with the Britten Choir).
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