BIOGRAPHY
Praised as a performer who “gives himself completely to the singing” (Unser Lübeck), French tenor Morgan Manifacier is quickly establishing an international career for his interpretation of wide-ranging repertoire in opera, art song, early music, and contemporary music. He has sung many opera roles of the repertoire, including Pelléas in Pelléas et Mélisande, the title role of Pygmalion by Rameau, Chevalier de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites, Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, Sultan Soliman in Zaide, Agenore in Il re pastore, Siavash in the world premiere of Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s We the Innumerable, and Sorcerer in Dido and Æneas, among others.
On the concert stage, he has performed internationally at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, The University of Oxford with the Oxford International Song Festival, Sibelius Hall in Järvenpää (Finland), Lauderdale House in London, Werner Hall at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Walter Hall at The University of Toronto, Conservatoire national supérieur d’Art dramatique in Paris, and Thayer Hall at Colburn in Los Angeles. He is a two-time winner of The American Prize in Voice, the recipient of the Jere H. Brophy Scholar Award from the S. Livingston Mather Vocal Competition, and the winner of the Duo Prize at the John Kerr Award for English Song with his duo partner, pianist Corinne Penner.
With a repertoire spanning from the Renaissance to world premieres, Manifacier is a committed proponent of art song repertoire. He notably champions the works of French composers and frequently performs Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel, Fauré’s La bonne chanson and other great cycles of the canon. He has performed with many organizations and concert series worldwide, such as the Oxford International Song Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, Cincinnati Song Initiative, and the Toronto Summer Music Festival.
Deeply committed to education, Manifacier serves on faculty at Baylor University as Assistant Professor of Voice. Also in demand as a guest teacher and clinician, he has presented lectures and masterclasses at distinguished universities across the world, including Gachon University (Seoul), Kyoto City University of Arts, Temple University, Concordia College (Fargo-Moorhead), Texas Tech University, the University of Mobile, and Trinity College (Hartford). As a French-repertoire coach, he was recently invited to work with singers of the OperaFest program at the Sewanee Music Center and to coach voice-piano duos at the AlpenKammerMusik Festival in Austria. He recently joined the Voice Faculty at Varna International Music Academy in Columbia, SC, and continues to maintain an active private voice studio.
Manifacier holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Stony Brook University, where he studied with Randall Scarlata and Jeremy Little on a full-tuition scholarship. He is the grateful recipient of fellowships from the Franz-Schubert-Institut, SongFest, Musiktheater Bavaria, and Amherst Early Music, as well as several career grants from the Anna Sosenko Assist Trust and The Performing Arts Consortium.
