Vocation : Entertain/Music : Vocalist/Opera

Vina Bovy (Malvina Bovi Van Overberghe) born Ghent 22 May 1900, died in the same city 16 May 1983 was a Belgian operatic soprano.She studied in the Conservatoire in Ghent under Willemot, and first appeared on stage aged 17 as Argentine in Les deux billets (Poise). Her debut at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie was on 4 October 1920 as Marguerite in Gounod's Faust. At the Monnaie she went on to sing Dorabella in Così fan tutte, Micaela in Carmen, Sophie in Werther, Parassia in Sorochintsy Fair, and Princesse Aurore in Le songe d'une nuit d'hiver.After establishing herself at the Monnaie, she undertook engagements around France and Belgium, leading to her debut at the Opéra-Comique on 9 March 1925 (Manon). She quickly became one of the leading sopranos in the French capital, singing Lakmé, Mimi in La bohème, Mireille, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, the three soprano roles in The Tales of Hoffmann, Leila in The Pearl Fishers, Alexina in Le roi malgré lui and Violetta in La traviata. She created the role of Myriem in La nuit embaumée by Hirschmann. With Luis Mariano Bovy appeared in Don Pasquale by Donizetti in 1944.
Noticed by Toscanini, she went to sing the Italian repertoire at La Scala Milan but she made her debut in Italian at the Colon in Buenos Aires, she never sang at la Scala. This led to her international career, with invitations from the Teatro Colón, Liceu, Madrid, Monte-Carlo, Rome. At the Paris Opéra she sang from 1935 to 1947, including Gilda, Juliette, Lucia di Lammermoor, Marguerite, Thais and Princess Shemakhan (The Golden Cockerel). She sang in Beethoven's 9th symphony under Toscanini in 1938 in New York, during a period (1936–38) when she also appeared at the Metropolitan Opera. A broadcast on 23 January 1937 of Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann with Bovy in the soprano roles has been issued on CD; she also sang Giulietta on the 1948 Opéra-Comique recording. In the 1930s she also recorded excerpts from La traviata and Rigoletto with Georges Thill.
Bovy played Séraphine in the 1943 Abel Gance film Le Capitaine Fracasse (after Théophile Gautier), in which she both sings and acts.
Bovy was the director of the Koninklijke Opera Gent from 1947 to 1955, where she sang the title role in L'aiglon and Katiusha in Risurrezione.With a fine coloratura, Bovy had a well-trained voice, and typically French in sound.

Camille Maurane (November 29, 1911 – January 21, 2010), born Camille Moreau, was a French baryton-martin singer. His father was a music teacher and he started singing as a child in the Maîtrise Saint-Evode in Rouen. The sudden death of his mother and family upheaval meant a break of twelve years in regular singing.
He studied at the Paris Conservatoire in the class of Claire Croiza from 1936 to 1939. He began his professional career as a singer in 1940 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. After his debut as the Moine musicien in Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame on 14 January 1940, he went to create the following roles at the Opéra-Comique:

the captain (Nèle Dooryn, 1940)
Doria (Ginevra, 1942)
a man, a peasant (Mon Oncle Benjamin, 1942)
a young man (Le Oui des Jeunes Filles, 1949).
Un Soldat (Dolorès, 1952)He also sang in The Barber of Seville, La Basoche, Carmen, Lakmé, Louise, Madame Bovary, Madame Butterfly, Werther, Pelléas et Mélisande and oratorios like La Chanson du mal-aimé. He was occasionally billed under the name Moreau.His voice was typical of the baryton-martin range (between baritone and tenor). He is famous for his interpretation of Debussy's Pelléas, for which he took part in three complete recordings of Pelléas et Mélisande. He is also regarded as one of the best interpreters of French mélodies, of which he left many recordings, since reissued on CD, and of Fauré's Requiem. His repertoire extended back to music of Rameau through to Arthur Honegger, Léo Ferré and other contemporaries.
A dedicated teacher, he taught at the Paris Conservatory until 1981.

José Luccioni (14 October 1903 in Bastia – 5 October 1978 in Marseille) was a French operatic tenor of Corsican origin. He possessed one of the best dramatic voices of the 1930s and 1940s.
Initially a racing car driver and mechanic at the Citroën car company, his voice was discovered while he was serving in the military. He studied singing in Paris with the eminent former tenors Léon David and Léon Escalais and made his debut in Rouen as Cavaradossi in Tosca in 1931. During the 1932-33 season he debuted at both the Palais Garnier and the Opéra-Comique, where he won considerable acclaim as Don José in Carmen, a role he sang an estimated 500 times during his career.
He sang widely in Europe, spending much of 1935-37 in Italy, appearing in Florence, Turin and Verona but mostly at the Rome Opera. He also appeared at the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden, the Monte Carlo Opera, the Liceo in Barcelona and other European venues. He made his South American debut at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1936, and sang in the United States at the Lyric Opera of Chicago during the 1937-38 season.
Luccioni had an impressively large voice that combined beauty with power, in the tradition of his great French predecessor at the Paris Opéra, Paul Franz (1876–1950). He was also a fine singing-actor. Notable roles of his included Roland, Samson, Vasco, Jean, Turiddu, Canio, Chenier, Radames and Otello. He also appeared in a few motion pictures, including Colomba (1948) and Le bout de la route (1948). After retirement, he served as Director of the Opéra de Nice.
His son, Jacques Luccioni, was also an opera singer, first as a tenor and later as a baritone.
Luccioni died in the South of France shortly before his 75th birthday. He left a sizeable legacy of recordings made during his vocal prime. A wide selection of these recordings are available on CD. They confirm Luccioni's reputation as being one of the finest ever French dramatic tenors.

Jean Giraudeau (1 July 1916, in Toulon – 7 February 1995), was an artist and French tenor, and later theatre director, particularly associated with the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and described in Grove as having a “lyrical voice” as well as being “a superb character actor”. He left a wide selection of recordings from both his operatic and concert repertoire, and created roles in several contemporary operas.

Michel Dens (22 June 1911 in Roubaix – 19 December 2000 in Paris) was a French baritone, particularly associated with the French repertory, both opera and operetta.
Born Maurice Marcel, the son of a journalist, he studied at the Academy of Music in Roubaix. He made his debut at the Opéra de Lille, as Wagner in Gounod's Faust, in 1934, and remained there as a member until 1936. Thereafter he sang at the Opera Houses of Bordeaux, Grenoble, Toulouse and Marseille. In 1943, he was heard at the Monte Carlo Opera as Escamillo, Valentin, and the Count in Le nozze di Figaro.
After the Second World War, he began a very successful career at the Opéra-Comique and the Palais Garnier in Paris. His roles at the Opéra-Comique included; Figaro, Lescaut, Zurga, Frédéric, Ourrias, Dapertutto, Alfio, Marcello, Scarpia, et al., he took part there in the creation of Emmanuel Bondeville's Madame Bovary, on 1 June 1951.
His debut role at the Opéra in 1947 was in the title role of Rigoletto, he also sang there as Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor, Hérode in Hérodiade, Athanaël in Thais, et al. He appeared with success at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and at most of the great Opera Houses of France.
He also appeared in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and North Africa.
He enjoyed a remarkably long and successful career, singing in opera as late as 1979, and also attaining magnificent success in French and Viennese operettas, notably in Lehár's The Land of Smiles and The Merry Widow. He also sang in works by Louis Varney, Robert Planquette, Charles Lecocq, André Messager, and others. As late as 1992, he gave concerts in Paris and Marseille. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur.
Dens sang an estimated 10,000 performances during his long career.

Ernest Blanc (November 1, 1923 – December 22, 2010) was a French opera singer, one of the leading baritones of his era in France.
Born in Sanary-sur-Mer, Ernest Blanc studied at the Music Conservatory of Toulon with Sabran, from 1946 to 1949. He made his debut in Marseille, as Tonio, in 1950. He then sang throughout France in the French and Italian repertories.
In 1954, he made his debut at the Palais Garnier in Paris, as Rigoletto, he sang there as first baritone for 25 years in a wide repertoire (Rameau, Mozart, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Verdi, Puccini, etc.). He also appeared often at the Opéra-Comique, and was a regular guest at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
His career took an international turn in 1958, with debut at the Bayreuth Festival, followed by debuts at La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Monte Carlo Opera, the Teatro Nacional Sao Carlos in Lisbon, the Liceo in Barcelona, the Berlin State Opera, etc.
He also enjoyed considerable success in America, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, etc.
Notable roles included; Don Giovanni, Valentin, Zurga, Escamillo, Golaud, Germont, Renato, Amonasro, Scarpia, Riccardo in I puritani, opposite Joan Sutherland, Alfonso in La favorite, Wolfram, Telramund, etc.
A stylish singer and a fine musician, he possessed a beautiful voice with a brilliant upper register and impeccable diction, one of the few post war French singers to have enjoyed a truly international career. After his retirement he taught in Paris.

Erika Köth (15 September 1925 in Darmstadt – 20 February 1989 in Speyer) was a German operatic coloratura soprano, particularly associated with the roles of Zerbinetta and Zerlina.
Köth began a musical studies in Darmstadt with Elsa Blank in 1942, and after an interruption resumed them in 1945. She made her stage debut in Kaiserslautern as Philine in Mignon, in 1948, and then sang in Karlsruhe (1950–53). She made her debut at the Munich State Opera and the Vienna State Opera in 1953, and at the Berlin State Opera in 1961. She appeared regularly at the Salzburg Festival (1955–64), as the Queen of the Night and Konstanze and Sophie, and in Bayreuth (1965–68), as the Woodbird. She also made guest appearances in Milan, Paris, London, etc.
Her repertory included: Susanna, Zerlina, Sophie, Despina, Queen of the Night, Lucia, Gilda, Stravinsky's Le Rossignol, and The Rake's Progress.
She had a small but piercing voice of great agility with a range extending remarkably high.
She can be seen on black-and-white video in the role of Rosina in a complete German performance of The Barber of Seville with Fritz Wunderlich, Hermann Prey, and Hans Hotter, and in a German performance of Don Giovanni, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Donald Grobe, Walter Berry, and Josef Greindl. Her discography also includes many operetta and lieder recordings.

Georgette "Géori" Boué (16 October 1918 – 5 January 2017) was a French soprano, particularly associated with the French repertory, especially Marguérite, Thais and Salomé (Massenet). She was born in Toulouse. Following her career in France and other European centres, she was a teacher and "perceptive observer of the French operatic scene".

Giannina Arangi-Lombardi (20 June 1891, Marigliano – 9 July 1951, Milan) was a spinto soprano, particularly associated with the Italian operatic repertory.