Olivier Lexa

Originator and artistic director of the Fondazione delle Arti – Venezia and founder of the Club delle Arti, Olivier Lexa has been closely involved in the Venetian cultural scene since 2007. Author and stage director, he is trained as an historian and musician. Having served as chief executive of the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de musique romantique française until 2010, in 2011 he founded the Venetian Centre for Baroque Music, of which he was artistic director until 2017, under the presidency of Jordi Savall. During the same period he began working with the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with Christian Boltanski in 2011 and Xavier Veilhan in 2017. In 2014 he staged the first recreation of L’Eritrea by Francesco Cavalli in a production of Teatro La Fenice, which received widespread critical acclaim in the press. In 2016 he worked as dramaturge of a new production of Verdi’s I Due Foscari at Teatro alla Scala in Milan (with Placido Domingo singing the title role), as well as a new production of Madama Butterfly also at La Scala conducted by Riccardo Chailly and L’Opera seria by Gassmann conducted by René Jacobs at La Monnaie (Bruxelles).

In 2016 he also staged the first recreation in modern times of Cavalli’s L’Oristeo, led by Jean-Marc Aymes at the Opéra de Marseille, and a new production of Peccati capitali, directed by Leonardo García Alarcón at the Doge’s Palace in Venice, in co-production with Carnegie Hall (New York, February 2017).  In 2017 he is working as an associate scheduler for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, leading a series of performances with Xavier Veilhan.  He works also as dramaturge on Corpi Ingrati, a new production of the Ballet National de Marseille with the choreographers Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten.

In 2018, at the Warsaw Philharmonic, Olivier Lexa staged Naïs by Rameau, with the choir, the orchestra and the soloists Il Giardino d’Amore conducted by Stefan Plewniak, and with the Olga Stawska-Lipczynska State Ballet from Poznan. The show is remounted at Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz.

In 2019, Olivier Lexa stages the world premiere of Le Silence des ombres, opera on Les Trois Petits Drames pour marionnettes by Maurice Maeterlinck, set to music by Benjamin Attahir. The coproduction unites La Monnaie (Bruxelles), the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, the National Opera of Warsaw - Teatr Wielki, the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth and the European Network of Opera Academies.

Olivier Lexa is a novelist (Morceaux choisis, 2011; L’Education vénitienne, 2016) and essayist (Venise, l’Eveil du Baroque, 2011; Francesco Cavalli, 2014; La Musique à Venise, 2015; Monteverdi et Wagner. Penser l'opéra, 2017; Léonard de Vinci et l'invention de l'opéra, 2019).  He is published by Actes-Sud.  He regularly teaches at the Bocconi University in Milan and at the European Institute of Design in Ve