Lea Desandre

Lea Desandre (born 1993) is a French-Italian operatic mezzo-soprano.

Biography

Desandre was born in 1993 to a French father and an Italian mother. Desandre trained in dance as a child, and she joined the children's choir of the Opéra national de Paris at the age of twelve. She later moved to Venice to train under Sara Mingardo. Desandre joined William Christie's in 2015. She performed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2016, and she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in 2018. with The New York Times writing in 2022 that she "has established herself as one of today’s most exciting voices in early-music performance". Since 2015, Desandre's roles have included Urbain in Les Huguenots, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Annio in La clemenza di Tito, Sesto in Giulio Cesare, Dido in Dido and Aeneas, La Messaggera in L'Orfeo, and Flerida in Erismena. Desandre also performs chamber music, including regular appearances with lutenist Thomas Dunford and his Jupiter Ensemble.