ENG.
From a very young age, Clara Barbier Serrano learns to sing “let’s have a drink, my sickle is lost” on a maximum of different vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs. It then takes her ten years at the conservatory in Montpellier to discover the impossibility of reproducing this phenomenon on a violin, and she decides to go study classical singing in Paris, Leipzig, London, and then Paris again. During her travels, she finds very erudite people who help her produce a real “A,” “I,” and “O,” and then false “A,” “I,” etc.
The result: she falls madly in love with poetry and decides that Art Song will forever be her heart’s repertoire. She forms a duo with pianist Joanna Kacperek, and, lacking other performance places, they enter multiple international competitions, lose, travel, eventually find other platforms like Liedinnovation or Lied the Way, and then win prizes in international competitions such as the Wigmore Hall Song Competition, Wolf Wettbewerb Stuttgart, and the Lyon Chamber Music Competition in 2024 and 2025.
While art songs fill her soul, it is an irresistible need for physicality that drives Clara onto the opera stage. She naturally finds herself in extreme characters like Mozart's Queen of the Night, the Controller (Flight by Jonathan Dove), or Olympia (Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Neuchâtel 2020)but also loves to embody and give strength to leading roles such as Rodelinda (Händel), La Petite Sirène (Régis Campo) or Elisabeth (Les Enfants Terribles, Glass, Sevilla 2025).
As her life principles are rarely reflected in old repertoires, Clara quite naturally turned to new music to nourish her mind, where the playful onomatopoeia of childhood reveals its fullest potential. Recently, she collaborated on a great diversity of pieces with and by fascinating people such as Martin Matalon, Anne le Bozec, and ensembles such as Ensemble Écoute and Le Balcon.
In 2025, her first CD Woven Words is dedicated to musical friendships and admirations, always keeping at its heart the connection between words and sounds.