JenniferFrance
- Soprano


About Jennifer
Winner of the 2018 Critics’ Circle Emerging Talent Award, British soprano Jennifer France was described in WhatsOnStage as the "living jewel in opera’s crown."
Recent highlights include Zerbinetta at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, two returns to the Royal Opera House for Iphis Jephtha conducted by Laurence Cummings and Despina Così fan tutte with Alexander Soddy and as Beatrice in the world premiere of Pascal Dusapin’s Il viaggio, Dante at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
24/25 sees Jennifer make her Opéra National de Paris debut singing Beatrice in Dusapin’s Il viaggio, Dante conducted by Kent Nagano. Jennifer will also make a return to the London Philharmonic Orchestra singing Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with Edward Gardner, join Jaime Martin and the Orquesta Nacionales de España for the Spanish premiere of Brett Dean’s In spe contra spe, and return to the London Sinfonietta singing James MacMillan’s Love Bade Me Welcome.
A prolific contemporary artist, she has sung Gerald Barry’s The Eternal Recurrence with the Britten Sinfonia, which was recorded for Signum, and in the world premiere of Brett Dean’s In This Brief Moment with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Nick Collon. She made her BBC Proms debut in 2017 and Salzburg Festival debut in 2019 singing Pascal Dusapin’s Medeamaterial with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. Last season, she made her debut at the Edinburgh International Festival with Hans Abrahamsen’s Let me tell you conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth and returned to the BBC Proms with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner for Ligeti’s Requiem. Contemporary opera includes the title role in The Cunning Little Vixen for Opera Holland Park, Alice in Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, First Niece Peter Grimes, and Lessons in Love and Violence for The Royal Opera House, La Princesse in Philip Glass’ Orphée for English National Opera, and Ophelia in Brett Dean’s Hamlet for Glyndebourne On Tour.
Representation
Worldwide general management with Askonas Holt
Season Highlights
Video
- Playing
Jennifer France performs ‘Les roses d’Ispahan’ by Fauré
Credit: Moran Magen
Jennifer France performs ‘Crede sol che a nuovi ardori’ by Il Vologeso
Credit: The Mozartists
Jennifer France performs ‘Endless Pleasure, Endless Love’ from Semele
Credit: Deutsche Haendel Solisten Haendel Festspielchor
Jennifer France performs 'Grossmächtige Prinzessin’ from Ariadne auf Naxos
Credit: Opera North
Jennifer France performs 'Neghitossi or voi che fate?' from Handel's Ariodante
Credit: Academy of Ancient Music
Selected Repertoire
Barry
Alice's Adventures Under Ground (Alice)
Beethoven
Fidelio (Marzelline)
Bellini
La Sonnambula (Amina) • I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Giulietta)
Benjamin
Into the Little Hill • Lessons in Love and Violence (Witness / Singer / Woman)
Bernstein
Candide (Cunegonde) • West Side Story (Maria)
Britten
A Midsummer Night's Dream (Tytania) • Peter Grimes (1st Niece)
Dean
Hamlet (Ophelia)
Debussy
Pelléas et Mélisande (Mélisandre)
Delibes
Lakmé (Lakmé)
Donizetti
Lucia di Lammermoor (Lucia) • L'elisir d'amore (Adina)
Dove
Flight (The Controller)
Dusapin
Passion (Her) • Il Viaggio Dante (Beatrice) • Medeamaterial
Glass
Orphée (La Princesse Orphée)
Gounod
Roméo et Juliette (Juliette)
Hammerstein
Carousel (Julie / Carrie)
Handel
Semele (Semele) • Jephtha (Iphis) • Ariodante (Dalinda) • Alcina (Alcina) • Agrippina (Poppea)
Heggie
It's A Wonderful Life (Mary Hatch Bailey)
Humperdinck
Hänsel und Gretel (Sandman / Dew Fairy)
Janáček
The Cunning Little Vixen (Sharp Ears the Vixen)
MacRae
Anthropocene (Ice)
Mozart
Così fan tutte (Despina) • Le nozze di Figaro (Susanna) • Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Blonde / Konstanze) • Don Giovanni (Zerlina) • Mitridate, re di Ponto (Ismene) • Idomeneo (Ilia) • La clemenza di Tito (Servilia) • Die Zauberflöte (Pamina)
Norman
A Trip to the Moon (Eoa)
Offenbach
Fantasio (Princess Elsbeth) • Orphée aux enfers (Eurydice)
Puccini
Gianni Schicchi (Lauretta)
Ravel
L'enfant et les sortilèges (Le feuf / La Princesse / Le Rossignol)
Rossini
Le Comte Ory (Countess Adèle) • Il barbiere di Siviglia (Rosina)
Strauss, J.
Die Fledermaus (Adele)
Strauss, R.
Ariadne auf Naxos (Zerbinetta) • Arabella (Fiakermilli / Zdenka)
Sullivan
The Mikado (Yum-Yum) • The Pirates of Penzance (Mabel) • Ruddigore (Rose Maybud)
Tippett
The Midsummer Marriage (Bella)
Verdi
Un ballo in maschera (Oscar)
Weinberg
Die Passagierin (Yvette)
News
Press
Così fan tutte (Despina)
Royal Opera HouseJun 2024As the two schemers, Gerald Finley and Jennifer France both sang like a dream... France’s crystalline soprano sparkled as Despina
- Keith McDonnell, MusicOMH
- 26 June 2024
Jennifer France’s Despina was full of fun, with great comedic timing and clowning as the disguised doctor and notary, and was highly nimble vocally, with some cracking top notes too.
- Nick Boston, BachTrack
- 27 June 2024
The real subversive centre of the piece is the maid Despina sung by British soprano Jennifer France as a red-headed cocktail-shaking, bar-strutting whirlwind. Despina pushes the two sisters over the cliff edge of fidelity in her aria: “Una donna a quindici anni”—”A fifteen-year-old woman” making the most of her translucent vocal tone and powerful coloratura edge. France has to double up as an ancient doctor and notary utilising her fine comic acting skills.
- Adrian York, London Unattached
- 27 June 2024
Jennifer France’s Despina is an onstage dynamo, revelling in silly voices for her absurd turns as a doctor and notary.
- Flora Wilson, The Guardian
- 27 June 2024
an excellent Despina in the form of soprano Jennifer France, no doubt made for the part, with all the panache expected of Da Ponte’s sassy maid. Here, she mixed cocktails and danced on the counter top of a bar packed with men (instead of the usual chocolate drink she prepares for her mistresses) from where she dispatched a compelling “In uomini, in soldati”, one of several numbers she pulled off with energy and assuredness.
- Mahima Macchione, OperaWire
- 04 July 2024
Jennifer France also needs little introduction; she is a singer of boundless energy, great stage presence and unerring, innate musicality. ... Her voice is perfect for the Despina, light yet not insubstantial, every word clear, her ‘’In uomini! In soldati’ utter delight, topped only by her ‘Una donna a quindici anni’. And how she loved the voices of the Doctor and Notary. There seems no reason to doubt France’s career will continue its upward trajectory.
- Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
- 29 June 2024
Jeptha (Iphis)
Royal Opera House Covent GardenNov 2023There is some very fine singing, not only from Clayton’s magnificent Jephtha… but from Jennifer France, whose soprano sparkles as his unlucky daughter Iphis.
- Erica Jeal, The Guardian
- 09 November 2023
Jennifer France was perhaps the pick of them all as Iphis, with sweetness of tone all the way up to the glittering top of her register.
- David Karlin, Bachtrack
- 09 November 2023
Jennifer France made her engaging from her first entry and this Iphis might have been constrained by her parents' religion, but she certainly was not confined and France developed Iphis into a real character, all the while engaging with some superb singing.
- Robert Hugill, Planet Hugill
- 13 November 2023
Jennifer France has a clear and delicate tone and a fine capacity for filigree ornamentation
- Dr Adrian York, London Unattached
- 09 November 2023
The soprano captured the purity of spirit of Iphis, singing with sincerity and strength when urging her beloved Hamor to prove himself in battle beside Jephtha (‘Take the heart you fondly gave’), and beautiful lightness and clarity in ‘Tune the soft melodious lute’ and ‘Welcome as the cheerful light’, as the newly betrothed young girl prepares to meet and congratulate her victorious father.
- Claire Seymour, OperaToday
- 16 November 2023
The one absolute stand-out was the Iphis of Jennifer France, beyond criticism from just about every angle. Her voice goes from strength to strength. Its purity suits Handel perfectly, and yet France can convey such a huge range of emotion. Her ‘The Smiling Dawn’ from the first act was a true highlight of the evening. Handel asks for the voice to be in (agile) unison with the orchestral violins, and France and the Covent Garden strings were in perfect accord.
- Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
- 10 November 2023
Ligeti's Requiem
Royal Albert Hall, LondonAug 2023Jennifer France and Clare Presland were the hieratic soloists, their voices finely blended in the ambivalent closing Lacrimosa, its oscillating vocal lines fading away in irresolution.
- Tim Ashley, The Guardian
- 13 August 2023
Soprano Jennifer France and mezzo Clare Presland were strikingly animated in conveying their tormented anguish in the third movement, France in particular reaching out to the audience among the tumult of her dizzying high notes.
- Rohan Shotton, Bachtrack
- 13 August 2023
The two soloists, soprano Jennifer France and mezzo-soprano Clare Presland, conjured the right uncanny purity of sound...
- Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph
- 14 August 2023
Abrahamsen’s Let me tell you
Usher Hall, Edinburgh International FestivalAug 2023Two modern classics (Hans Abrahamsen’s orchestral song cycle Let me tell you, in which Jennifer France beautifully negotiated stratospheric demands as Shakespeare’s Ophelia; and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s blisteringly noisy Three Screaming Popes) were interspersed with two shorter works.
- Richard Morrison, The Times
- 07 August 2023
"Most moving of all was Let Me Tell You by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, which imagines the rich inner world of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was suffused with melancholy and a tender, solemn gravity unique in contemporary music, to which the singing of Jennifer France gave a piercing, poignant edge.
- Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph
- 14 August 2023
Ariadne auf Naxos (Zerbinetta)
Garsington OperaJun 2023France, in her second UK Zerbinetta this year, is also excellent, her coloratura wonderfully accurate and gleaming.
- Tim Ashley, The Guardian
- 19 June 2023
Here Zerbinetta’s showpiece aria and mock seduction by her fellow artistes (Marcus Farnsworth’s slippery Harlequin among them) becomes a cry for help, an act of self-sabotage. As brilliantly carried off by Jennifer France, the coloratura frenzy turns into manic hysteria.
- Neil Fisher, The Times
- 19 June 2023
Jennifer France’s quirky Zerbinetta is a fearless tour de force capped with a sparkling ‘Grossmächtige Prinzessin!’...
- John Allison, The Telegraph
- 19 June 2023
France accomplished emotional backflips as vividly as anything physical that her acrobats could have managed, bringing us from laughter to empathy in a heartbeat. The brilliance and clarity of France’s upper register is well charted, but here, she appealed just as much with the warmth and earnestness of her delivery, whatever the register.
- David Karlin, Backtrack
- 19 June 2023
Jake Heggie's It's A Wonderful Life
English National OperaNov 2022There’s a star turn too from another soprano, Jennifer France as George’s wife Mary..
- Erica Jeal, The Guardian
- 27 November 2022
As his loyal wife, Jennifer France sings with wonderful sweetness, especially up in the ledger lines.
- Richard Morrison, The Times
- 28 November 2022
There are moments of true ardour, notably Jennifer France singing radiantly as George's wife
- David Benedict, The Stage
- 28 November 2022
though making an ideal love-match with his clear-voiced wife Mary (Jennifer France), whose extended aria is one of the best things in the score.
- Nicholas Kenyon, The Telegraph
- 26 November 2022
Jennifer France’s lusciously lyrical soprano was a perfect fit for Mary’s youthful optimism, and France managed to inject some character into the somewhat insipid role. Mary’s Act 2 duet with Clara, in which they both express their concern for a George who, nine years into his marriage and burdened with responsibilities, cares and worries, seems low and lost, was the highpoint of the performance.
- Claire Seymour, Opera Today
- 27 November 2022
British soprano Jennifer France – ENO has always been so strong when it comes to promoting homegrown talent – makes spirited work of his loyal wife, Mary. Heggie’s score is not musically complex – “I always say I write musicals for opera singers”, he said in a recent interview – but beautiful and haunting nonetheless and showcased with confidence in Aletta Collins’s production.
- Fiona Mountford, inews
- 28 November 2022
They get tremendous support from Jennifer France as the long-suffering Mary Hatch Bailey, whose cookie-cutter American housewife role we can forgive as she transcends its limitations with singing that explores a teenager in love as much as a soulmate spouse.
- Gary Naylor, Broadway World
- 27 November 2022
Emotional truthfulness is left to the superb Jennifer France as his great love Mary Hatch, managing to move us at the end of Act One (pictured below with Ballentine) in love music which hasn’t really been earned.
- David Nice, The Arts Desk
- 26 November 2022
English Soprano, Jennifer France played Mary Hatch Bailey, George’s wife. As a small-town American beauty, she was charmingly innocent and her vocals managed to combine an alluring freshness with enough power to comfortably fill the auditorium.
- Fiona Maclean, London Unattached
- 26 November 2022
Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Royal Festival Hall, LondonSep 2022It is a rare treat to have two separate song-cycles in the same concert, both from the less familiar category and both performed by the same singer. So all credit to Jennifer France, who bestrode the two halves of this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert with its principal conductor Edward Gardner in charge. France was a bright, fresh-toned soprano, her voice powerful enough to ride the orchestral textures in Danse cosmique, and full of spleen too in the way she spat out “mille neuf cent soixante-quatorze” in the extract from Solzhenitsyn entitled À Slava et Galina, before ending with a deliciously floated “jusqu’au bout”. ... France’s soprano soared effortlessly above the stave. France was particularly impressive not only in negotiating the wide leaps in the tessitura but also in giving full voice to the moments of grief and outpouring of anguish, most notably in “O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul”."
- Alexander Hall, Bachtrack
- 29 September 2022
Brett Dean In This Brief Moment (World Premiere)
Sep 2022Brett Dean’s new work is quite a mind-blowing affair: an evolution cantata, viewed from the perspective of this present brief moment in time and spanning 4.5 billion years in 50 minutes. Dean sees it as a love song to planet Earth and the life-force that has conditioned our very existence, but also a lament…Yet it was Darwin’s measured and poetic tone that created the requisite sense of awe, sung by soloists Jennifer France and Patrick Terry with moments of extreme beauty in the intertwining of their soaring lines. These two effectively stole the show, soprano France with her impeccable diction and laser precision…
- Rian Evans, The Guardian
- 26 September 2022
Dean is at his finest when ratcheting up the tension, especially in the earlier reaches of In This Brief Moment. Vivid touches abound: slithering contrabassoon and emphatic choral whispers take us into a murky geological underworld; wordless voices and ominous drum underpin “the Great Dying”. Cutting through an orchestra and two choirs (the CBSO Chorus and Hallé Choir) at full tilt were the glittering soprano Jennifer France and the countertenor Patrick Terry, who let loose in an unexpected cabaret-style section about humanity’s insatiable greed.
- Rebecca Franks, The Times
- 26 September 2022
Pascal Dusapin's Il Viaggio, Dante (Beatrice)
Aix-en-Provence FestivalJul 2022Soprano Jennifer France playing the role produced a confident performance, capturing the changing embodiments of the character, which she supported with an expressive vocal presentation.
- Alan Neilson, OperaWire
- 02 August 2022
Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage (Bella)
London Philharmonic OrchestraSep 2021Jennifer France, stage animal with a lighter-soprano-voice that still cuts a swathe…was the only to one to bring character-led movement to life…
- David Nice, The Arts Desk
- 26 September 2021
Jennifer France and Toby Spence made for an outstanding ‘second’ couple, in reality no more secondary than their Mozartian model…
- Mark Berry, Boulezian
- 26 September 2021
The great performances came from Toby Spence and Jennifer France as Jack and Bella, touching, witty and characterised with wonderful subtlety.
- Tim Ashley, The Guardian
- 26 September 2021
Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen
Opera Holland ParkJul 2021Jennifer France is irrepressible as Vixen Sharpears, exuding radiant energy…
- David Nice, The Arts Desk
- 14 July 2021
Jennifer France was an excellent Vixen, fearless in vocal attack (top notes ping) and full of energy
- Mark Pullinger, Bachtrack
- 14 July 2021
Jennifer France as the Vixen captivated from the moment she appeared, embodying a life-force untrammelled by human doubts and regrets and singing gloriously.
- Séamus Rea, Culture Whisper
- 14 July 2021
Jennifer France’s charismatic performance, gloriously sung…
- Erica Jeal, The Guardian
- 14 July 2021
Vocally, the performance belonged to France’s Vixen, ever expressive and, in dramatic terms, utterly convincing. France’s voice is miraculously free, eminently capable of taking anything Janáček throws at her in her stride.
- Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
- 14 July 2021
Jennifer France was a bright-toned, vivacious Vixen…
- Barry Millington, The Standard
- 14 July 2021
Jennifer France’s Vixen fizzes with life. Voice, bright and sweet, delivery bold and larky, flinging Janáček’s jagged conversational fragments around before swelling briefly into the sensuality of the love-music – or sex-music, let’s be honest – with Julia Sporsén’s Fox, she’s irresistible.
- Alexandra Coghlan, The Telegraph
- 14 July 2021
Jennifer France is a glorious Vixen, her voice agile and luminous.
- Rebecca Franks, The Times
- 19 July 2021
Homelands
CDOct 2023France captures the dramatic, even ‘operatic’ quality, of the song, allowing the passionate impulses of the language to swell richly and lyrically, always attentive to the text, then sinking into a softness suffused with sensuous sweetness.
- Opera Today
- 10 January 2024