Mécénat Musica

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Mécénat Musica Artist-in-Residence collaborates in performances with Mécénat Musica organizations and is a donor under the Mécénat Musica program that she supports. Karina Gauvin has performed with 23 grant recipients of the Mécénat Musica program.

Gauvin is a soprano of international renown, performing with the greatest symphony orchestras, opera companies and recital series around the world. Gauvin has recorded 50+ albums and her numerous distinctions include three Grammy nominations. The New York Times describes Gauvin as singing “with serene ease and radianceʺ and Opera News calls her the “queen of Baroque opera.”

After many years performing worldwide, soprano Karina Gauvin settled (mostly) back home in Montreal. The internationally renowned soprano won four Juno Awards, was nominated for a Grammy three times, and has a discography of nearly 60 titles. Through her partnership with Mécénat Musica as their inaugural artist-in-residence (2020–2025), Gauvin has kindled (and rekindled) collaborations and projects that resonate much closer to home.

Beginnings

Born in Montreal to two opera singers, Gauvin always had music in the home. Growing up in Toronto, at age eight, she joined the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus and took lessons from mezzo-soprano Catherine Robbin. When she was 17, her parents warned her against singing professionally by saying, “You’re a very sensitive, very fragile flower, and we don’t know if you’re cut out for this career.”

Gauvin shifted away from music, studied art history at McGill, but sang with McGill’s concert choir. At 19, she says, she had “the calling.” Gauvin auditioned for a music-faculty concert and got the part despite not being a music student. The choir’s conductor, Nicole Paiement, took her aside and said, “You need to pursue this.”

From there, Gauvin studied at the Conservatoire in Montreal with Marie Daveluy, won several competitions, and toured with Jeunesses Musicales Canada while still a student. At one competition, the president of the jury offered her one year of postgraduate studies at the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow. “I was in total shock. And so I accepted, obviously,” she says. During this period, she also auditioned for Bernard Labadie. After several months abroad in Scotland, Gauvin flew home for Christmas. The next morning, she received a call from Labadie at 7 a.m. to replace an ailing soprano for Handel’s Messiah in Ottawa. “I said, ‘Can I have a few moments to wake up and think about it?’,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I’m giving you 15 minutes. The bus is leaving in an hour.’” From then on, Gauvin worked steadily with Labadie.

Opera

Gauvin is best known for her work in the baroque repertoire, especially the Handel opera recordings she made with the late harpsichordist and conductor Alan Curtis. During this period, Gauvin says, “we were rehearsing, recording, eating, and sleeping in this wonderful old monastery in Lonigo, Italy, so we were fully immersed and living the music 24/7.”

Her most performed role is Handel’s Alcina. She has sung it worldwide including stops in Versailles, Los Angeles, Madrid, Caen, and Brno. “Alcina is onstage practically the entire time. She’s busy; there’s a lot to sing, and the arias are difficult, and you have to be constantly aware,” Gauvin says. When preparing such a demanding role, she recommends singers always sing full voice in rehearsal, so that they know “the strength you need to carry through on the main stage.” Gauvin’s other Handel roles include Poppea in Agrippina, Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare, Armida in Rinaldo, and the title character in Rodelinda.

Another career highlight is Vitellia in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, a role Gauvin has sung at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris and the Teatro Real in Madrid. She loves working through the character’s complex trajectory, but acknowledges its many challenges: “It’s a difficult role, sometimes, because even when you know that you’ve done a great job, you don’t get public sympathy, because of the cruelty of the [character].”

During the early stages of the pandemic, Gauvin became Mécénat Musica’s artist-in-residence, enabling her to forge several local collaborations. The soprano worked with 21 Mécénat Musica organizations, including Orchestre Métropolitain, Ensemble Caprice, Ladies’ Morning Musical Club, and Les Violons du Roy. She has enjoyed the opportunity the role has provided to perform more locally. “When you’re in the heat of the career, you’re running around so much, you forget where your home is,” says Gauvin. “My house was a place where my stuff lived. I was just here to rest, rehearse, and leave again. It was very touching to be able to do these different projects with different musicians here in Montreal, and to renew these bonds.”

Other Pandemic Projects

Two other projects allowed Gauvin to use the pandemic to connect to her Quebec roots: Jules Massenet – Integrale (2022), and her solo album, Marie Hubert: Fille du Roy (2024). For the Integrale, Gauvin sang 65 of the project’s 333 melodies recorded with pianist Olivier Godin, alongside 16 other Canadian singers. Gauvin found it “revelatory” to dive into Massenet, as “you could really see that Massenet was a fan of Wagner.”

The solo album was a true passion project, using Quebec folk songs to tell the story of her ancestor Marie Hubert. Gauvin conceptualized a seven-part, one-woman show, using historical facts to recount the life of this woman’s passions and struggles. “I’m so proud of that project, because I elaborated it from start to finish: the original concept, the writing, the idea of what Marie Hubert may have been like, the pieces, how I wanted them to sound. I didn’t do the orchestrations, but I was really involved in the structure and style that certain pieces should have. I also worked on the visual concept, the research for the costume, the visuals for the video.”

She describes it as “a life project,” telling the story of this 15-year-old girl, and “the sacrifice and the courage it must have taken to leave her native France, probably never to return. … It’s high time we honour these women,” Gauvin says. “We owe them so much.”