Ellen Giacone
born in Italy and began learning the piano and violin when she moved to Paris at the age of 8. She started to train her voice when she was 17 and completed a professional degree of classical singing in June 2011, after taking classes in Paris with Alexandra Papadjiakou, Mary Saint-Palais and Robert Expert. She currently studies at the CRR of Paris with Fusako Kondo.

Since 2002, Ellen has developed a special taste for baroque repertoire and has performed many concerts, mostly one-to-a-part programmes, with a number of choirs and consorts in Paris, Metz and Geneva. She has also sung several times under the baton of Ton Koopman, in Paris and New York: she was praised for her interpretation of Händel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day in the New York Times.

She has been a member of the Monteverdi Apprenticeship Scheme 2012-2013, joining the Monteverdi Choir conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner for various projects all over Europe. In 2012 she has also sang regularly with other English ensembles including Polyphony conducted by Stephen Layton.

For the past six years, she has been a member of the French ensemble Athénaïs, which she recorded two albums with, focused on French baroque repertoire (Anima Christi, 2011 & O Amor Jesu, 2014, Bayard Musique). She also regularly sings with the Parisian ensembles Pygmalion, Accentus, and Luce del Canto, which she recorded the album Paroles à l’absent with (works by Chausson, Ravel and Caplet, NoMad Music, 2014).

Her first solo album, Vocalise Ave Maria, will be released in November 2014 by the French label Monthabor. On stage, she sang various operas and oratorios: Rousseau’sDevin du Village (2006), Belinda in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (2009 and 2014), Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (2011), Händel’s Messiah (2011).

She also enjoys a variety of solo concert work, especially 20th century composers like Fauré (Requiem), Stravinsky (Rossignol), Poulenc (Thérèse in Les Mamelles de Tirésias), Britten (The Governess in The Turn of the Screw) or Berio (Chamber Music). Since the end of 2013, she is a member of Ensembl-e-change, a group created by Nicolas Agùllo for the interpretation of contemporary repertoire as well as arrangements of traditional music from South-America.

More recently, she started singing jazz music after having studied the double bass with Christian Gentet for several years; she has recently created The Body and Soul Trio, which focuses on jazz standards for voice, double bass and piano.

In addition to her musical experience, Ellen was a student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris and holds a Master of Science in Biology as well as a Master of Business Administration. Currently living in Paris, she speaks Italian, French, Dutch and English fluently, and has studied German.