CORINNE ORDE is half Belgian. After graduating in French from London University she studied singing with the mezzo-soprano Ana-Raquel Satre.

In the mid-1980s Corinne Orde founded the Baroque Consort of Singers, a five-voice ensemble devoted to the performance of late Renaissance and early Baroque works for voice, adding various combinations of continuo instruments when required. The group performed mainly unpublished works from manuscript and library collections and gave concerts in many of the London venues, including the Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room and St John's, Smith Square. Corinne Orde was the group's artistic director until the early 1990s when it had to disband because three of its other four singers went to live abroad. She then concentrated her career on oratorio and church music, in concert and liturgical settings.

In 2000 Corinne created DepList, a website for professional singers based in and around London.

Corinne Orde is now renewing her earlier interest in the mélodie and recently returned to her native language in an album of settings by Debussy and Fauré symbolist poets with Belgian connections: Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire and Charles Van Lerberghe. Corinne Orde studied some of the Debussy songs with Ana-Raquel Satre, whose own teacher, the French soprano Ninon Vallin, worked with the composer on his songs and performed them with him as her accompanist.

She is currently preparing an album of songs by Louis Vierne.

Watch Le Paon (The Peacock) and La Pintade (The Guinea-fowl) from Ravel's Histoires naturelles cycle of songs about birds.

[Back]