John La Bouchardière
'John La Bouchardière is a British opera, film and television director.Biography
La Bouchardière was a chorister at Magdalen College, Oxford, studied at the University of Birmingham and was a staff director at English National Opera. He also spent several years working internationally as an assistant and revival director in opera, for such companies as the BBC, Channel 4, New Israeli Opera, Opera Graz, Opéra National du Rhin, Opera North, Scottish Opera, Teatro Liceu, Vlaamse Opera, Teatro São Carlos, La Fenice and Opera Zurich.
His recent productions include Semele, Eugene Onegin, Tamerlano, Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, Carmen, Cavalli's Giasone, and Mozart's Idomeneo.
He is best known for The Full Monteverdi, his acclaimed reworking of Monteverdi's Fourth book of Madrigals with I Fagiolini, winning a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2006; it toured widely as a live production, including a run of performances at Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, New York City. This was released in a film version in 2007 and has been awarded a Choc du Monde de la Musique.; La Bouchardière is creative director at Polyphonic Films and created Music Room, a classical music television series for the cable channel Sky Arts.
He returned to Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, New York in July 2013 to direct a controversial reimagining of Lera Auerbach's a cappella opera The Blind, for which the audience was blindfolded throughout. In 2014, he directed a new production of John Adams' El Niño for Spoleto Festival USA, which was widely praised for taking a very different approach from that of its original director, Peter Sellars. and returned to Spoleto Festival in 2019 to direct the first theatrical staging of Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles.
