THE PARIS OPERA PAYS TRIBUTE TO CHARLES BURLES

The Paris Opera would like to pay tribute to tenor Charles Burles who just passed away, at the age of 85. A major figure of the French operatic art, he was a wonderful singer of the Marseille Opera and Opéra-Comique stages. After his Paris Opera debuts in the beginning of the 1970s, he was often invited by director Rolf Liebermann, who associated him to many productions including Platée (Rameau, 1977), The Coronation of Poppaea (Monteverdi, 1978), Tom Jones (Philidor, 1979), Boris Godunov (Mussorgsky, 1980), The Daughter of the Regiment (Donizetti, 1980), as well as many operettas by Offenbach. If, as Jean Gourret put it, his “exceptional high voice, his dashing vocal virtuosity and his absolute mastery of the halftone art” allowed him to shine in the Bel Canto repertoire, the public of the Paris Opera rediscovered him in the late 1990s until the beginning of the 2000s in the works of Mozart (Le Nozze di Figaro, 1997), Bizet (Carmen, 1998) and Puccini (Tosca, 1998 and Turandot in 1997, 1999 and 2002). Charles Burles sang, among others, under the baton of Michel Plasson, Georges Prêtre, James Conlon, and in productions by Giorgio Strehler, Joseph Losey, Francesca Zambello, Robert Carsen.