Irène Kudela began studying piano in Prague and later earned First Prizes in Accompaniment and Chamber Music at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. She served as an assistant in the vocal classes there and was a professor of role studies until 1994.
Fluent in seven languages, she is frequently invited by major opera houses as a musical and language coach, as well as an assistant conductor. Her work has taken her to Paris, Washington, New York, Rome, Munich, Brussels, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, and to prestigious festivals such as Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence, and Glyndebourne.
After working for several years as assistant to Mstislav Rostropovich, she went on to collaborate with Pierre Boulez, Kent Nagano, Myung-Whun Chung, Charles Mackerras, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky, among others. She also served as assistant chorus master at the Paris Opera and is regularly invited as chorus conductor at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and by the Radio France Choir.
As a concert pianist, she performs regularly and has accompanied singers such as Barbara Hendricks, Camille Maurane, Galina Vishnevskaya, and Alain Vanzo. Irène Kudela gives numerous masterclasses for young singers and pianists at institutions such as the Paris Opera Academy, the National Opera Studio in London, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Royaumont Foundation, as well as in Gothenburg and Stockholm. Her honors include being named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, receiving the Critics’ Award for Best Operatic Production in 2014, and being a laureate of the Menuhin Foundation.
She currently teaches vocal coaching at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.
Specialty: Slavic music