Soubestre
Marie Soubestre is a soprano. Her strong affinity for contemporary music has led her to collaborate with numerous composers. In 2022, alongside her close artistic partner Maël Bailly, she created Echo, Narcisse et l’Art d’aimer, a springtime operetta whose libretto they co-wrote with Benjamin Athanase. The soloists of the Ensemble Intercontemporain enthusiastically embraced this unusual work, premiered at the Philharmonie de Paris.
Among the impactful artistic and personal encounters in Marie Soubestre’s journey is Franck Krawczyk. In June 2023, she took part in two projects under his artistic direction, at La Seine Musicale and Les Bouffes du Nord. In 2015, the Franco-Iranian composer Farnaz Modarresi-Far wrote Che si può fare for her, based on a text by Barbara Strozzi. Marie performed it in the finals of the French Masters of Vocal Art Excellence Competition, which she won in 2019. Their paths continued to cross: she recorded Farnaz’s Ballades oniriques with Collectif G for Radio France, a work that earned Farnaz a prize at the Grand Prix Lycéen des Compositeurs.
For her first album, Marie, weine nicht (released in January 2021), Marie turned to composer Graciane Finzi, who contributed Histoires de Monsieur Keuner based on a text by Bertolt Brecht. This debut album is devoted to composer Hanns Eisler. Since 2017, Marie has been pursuing doctoral research in performance: “Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht: An Ethics of Vocal Music.” The project is supervised jointly by Paris-Sorbonne University and the CNSMDP, where she studied under Glenn Chambers from 2009 to 2014.
The Eisler project was born out of a shared passion with pianist Romain Louveau, Marie’s long-time artistic partner. Their repertoire spans from Mozart to Barbara, including Schubert and Liszt, and they regularly perform as a duo at various festivals and venues.
Together with Antoine Thiollier, Romain co-founded the festival La Brèche, in which Marie has been involved since the first edition. A concert in a swimming pool, Elvira’s aria (I Puritani) sung ten times in a row to an audience of eight in a hotel room, outreach in local middle schools, solo guitar songs performed to one listener at a time, improvisations on Iranian poetry—La Brèche is a space where Marie embraces every artistic risk.
Antoine Thiollier is another key collaborator in Marie Soubestre’s artistic life. Directed by him, she played Micaela in Bizet’s Carmen with the ensemble Miroirs Étendus, premiered at the Théâtre du Beauvaisis in 2022. She is also both actress and singer in Un lieu incertain, a stage adaptation of a novel by Fred Vargas, premiered in October 2020. Both works will tour in 2023/2024, continuing a fruitful collaboration that began with Les Constellations, une théorie (2016), an opera by Joséphine Stephenson for which Antoine wrote the libretto and directed, and Victor Bang (2015), a youth show set somewhere between bombings and the stars.
Marie now also performs in a duo with pianist Maroussia Gentet. Their repertoire travels across centuries. Together, they created a recital-performance inspired by Marcel Proust, based on an original text by Marie, in which she humorously recounts her encounter with In Search of Lost Time in a playful mise en abyme. Along with pianist and video artist Matvey Zheleznyakov and violinist Apolline Kirklar, Maroussia and Marie are founding members of the new Collectif G, dedicated to contemporary repertoire and improvisation in both its sonic and performative dimensions.