Second prizewinner of the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Competition in 2014, soprano Jodie Devos enjoyed a flourishing early career before succumbing to cancer ten years later. Born in Libramont in the Walloon province of Belgium on October 10, 1988, she studied dance and then piano at the age of eleven, before taking up opera singing at the Ciney conservatory and continuing in this vein at the Namur music institute and the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she obtained a master's degree in Lilian Watson's class in 2013. Second place in the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Competition the following year marked the start of a remarkable career for the coloratura soprano, who joined the Opéra-Comique de Paris and distinguished herself in her first roles. Under contract with the Alpha Classics label since 2016, she records the French aria recital Il Était Une Fois... with Caroline Meng and the Quatuor Giardini, then Offenbach Colorature (2018), awarded a Diapason d'or and the Diapason for vocal recital of the year. On stage, her repertoire continues to expand, with appearances in several opera houses in France and Belgium, including Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Bastille (Paris), Mozart's The Magic Flute at La Monnaie in Brussels and Rossini's Guillaume Tell at the Chorégies d'Orange, among many other roles. Alternating roles follow the recitals And Love Said... on English-language melodies (2021), Bijoux Perdus (Diapason d'or, 2022) and her participation in two other award-winning recordings, Massenet: 22 Mélodies avec Orchestre with Véronique Gens, Chantal Santon Jeffery and Nicole Car (2022) and Rameau's opera Zoroastre conducted by Alexis Kossenko (2022). She also performs Philippe Boesmans' contemporary opera On purge bébé! in Brussels and Lyon, Donizetti's La Fille du régiment at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (Paris), and Verdi's Un bal masqué at Barcelona's Liceu in 2023, when she is struck down by breast cancer and dies on June 16, 2024, at the age of 35.
