Bridget Bazile - One Voice, Many Queens

One Voice Many Queens arrives in Lyon

We are honored to welcome Bridget Bazile and her luminous One Voice Many Queens to Bourse du Travail Lyon, a concert conceived as a living tribute to the women who shaped the vocal art across opera, gospel, and the great concert tradition. From our stage, we will frame her voice with the intimacy and focus it deserves, inviting listeners to follow a curated journey that moves from grand arias to spirituals, from lyrical storytelling to roof-raising praise. Expect a program that gracefully bridges repertoire you know by heart with discoveries shaped by fresh arrangements and the artist’s unmistakable timbre. Audiences can anticipate moments of elegance and grandeur alongside soulful reflection: the silken lyricism of an aria contrasted with the earthy resonance of a spiritual, the hush of unaccompanied prayer answered by the blaze of orchestral color at full tilt. Our technical team has prepared a warm, detailed sound image that lets every shift of color in Bazile’s instrument speak, and the lighting design will trace the “many queens” thread—appearing not as imitation, but as a sequence of portraits, each honored through style, poise, and phrasing. With the architecture of the room concentrating energy toward the stage, her pianissimos will carry with clarity, and her climaxes will rise with thrilling presence.

Bridget Bazile’s current artistic moment

Bridget Bazile arrives in Lyon on a run of acclaimed appearances that have underlined her command of both classical technique and gospel-rooted storytelling. In recent seasons she has deepened collaborations with ensembles equally at home in symphonic and spiritual traditions, refining a recital language that highlights vocal character above mere display. That is precisely what One Voice Many Queens showcases: an artist curating lineage. The “queens” here are the voices and legacies she salutes—operatic icons and great concert divas—embodied through the eloquence of repertoire choices and the narrative she builds between them. When Bazile leans into a spiritual like Deep River or Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, she carries the hall on a current of history; when she turns toward theater and opera, the phrasing broadens and the diction glows with that unmistakable stage sense. We have structured the evening to let her storytelling breathe, weaving solo spotlight moments with collaborative dialogues at the piano and, at times, with additional instrumental color. While the setlist can evolve to reflect her ongoing projects and recent inspirations, the throughline remains constant: sustained, burnished legato; cadences that resolve with inevitability; and a dramatic instinct that renders even familiar pages newly minted. For us as presenters, the excitement is to witness how she threads one portrait into another, so the audience perceives not a medley but an arc—an ascent—through different idioms that culminates in the shared space between them.

Here in Lyon, One Voice Many Queens is also the meeting point of artist and audience—an encounter we’ve prepared for with attention to pacing, room acoustics, and sightlines to capture the subtleties of her expression. Bazile’s current artistic news points to a season of broad reach: appearances across European capitals, expanded recital programs, and renewed commitments to educational work that feed directly back into the stage. We hear that vitality in her recent performances, where the spiritual core of the evening sits right alongside operatic finesse. That is the balance we’re poised to frame: a program that may include beloved spirituals such as Amazing Grace and arrangements that allow her to pivot into operatic territory with equal authority—think the lyrical caress of Summertime or the dramatic fire that kindred arias summon—without ever losing the thread of who she is. Our role is to shape the conditions for that synthesis: discreet amplification designed for acoustic integrity, a stage plot that keeps the vocalist front and center, and pauses paced to let silences resonate. One Voice Many Queens is less a sequence of numbers than a single dramatic gesture; hosting it in Lyon, we invite you to hear how Bridget Bazile gathers these lineages into one voice—supple, generous, and unmistakably her own—right here at Bourse du Travail Lyon.