Jean-Romain Vesperini

Biography

Jean-Romain Vesperini is both theatre director and opera director. He studied drama at l’Ecole du Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris and singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where he trained as a baritone. He has collaborated with famous directors such as Peter Stein Luc Bondy and Georges Lavaudant.

Recently, Jean-Romain Vesperini directed a new staging of Gounod’s Faust conducted by Michel Plasson and starring the tenor Piotr Beczala at the Opera National de Paris. He directed La Traviata for the Operas of Limoges, Reims and Rennes. The production has been broadcast on France Musique and national television with great success. He was then re-invited to create a new co-production of Lucia di Lamermoor. He also staged Carmen at the Hong Kong Opera.  

From 2008 until 2012 Vesperini held the position of resident director for the festival “Nuits de Corte” in Corsica where he directed Don Giovanni, Die Zauberflöte and Il Barbiere di Siviglia. At the Lyon Opera House, he staged the modern opera Douce et Barbe Bleue by Isabelle Aboulker and Pinocchio by Thierry Lalo at Opéra National de Paris.

His theater work has included Hanokh Levin’s The Labour of Life at the Comédie de Picardie, Ibsen’s La Dame de la Mer with the famous French actor Jacques Weber, Labiche’s L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine and Fausto Paravidino’s Due Fratelli for which he wrote the translation from Italian himself.

As a collaborator, he worked on operas like Don Carlo at Salzburg Festival, Aida at Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow then at La Scala di Milano, Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame, Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, Berg’s Lulu at the Opera National de Lyon — which Vesperini revived himself at La Scala and at the Wiener Festwochen, La Damnation de Faust at the Bolshoi in Moscow and Verdi’s Attila in Verona. For the Theatre he worked on Les Fausses Confidences by Marivaux with Isabelle Huppert, Ivanov by Tchekhov and Le Prix Martin by Labiche at Théâtre National de l’Odéon, The Tempest by Shakespeare at les Nuits d’été de Fourvières, The Night of The Iguana by Tennesse Williams, Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand at Maly Theatre in Moscow.