Following graduation from the conservatory in Lyon, France, Michèle Renoul began her post-secondary education studying general history at the University of Lyon. She then decided to pursue music as a vocation. She was accepted at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany. From a young age, she had the good fortune to benefit from studying with great artists and educators such as Françoise Léage, Anne-Marie Lamy, Elza Kolodin, Vitaly Margulis, Laurent Cabasso, Rena Shereshevskaya, and Ramon Walter. She obtained two master’s degrees, one in solo piano and the other in the interpretation of German Lied style music and French melody. She discovered and became passionate about music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She also desired to better understand repertoire traditionally inaccessible to piano, via training as a director of choirs and orchestras. She simultaneously studied voice as well as piano at the Hochschule in Freiburg. Very attached to the great piano repertoire, she studied this subject deeply with her professors and on her own, in addition to her work with German Lieder. She is interested in new music creations that permit her to understand and collaborate with contemporary classical music composers.
From this approach of adventure and artistic openness, she has worked with the group Accroche-Note since 1996. This is a group that has given concerts at major festivals and has performed approximately 50 world premiere pieces by composers such as Xenakis, Dusapin, Mâche, and Manoury. She has performed on numerous CDs produced by Accroche-Note. In solo performance or as part of a group, she has performed at Musica (Strasbourg), Présence (Paris), Trattoriae (Parma, Italy), Venice Biennal, as well as in Spain, the United States, and Australia.
She counts among her partners in chamber music performances numerous performers such as Elizabeth Vinciguerra (piano), Pascale Michaud (cello), Christophe Beau (cello), Caroline Stinson (cello), Armand Angster (clarinet), Françoise Kubler (voice), Marie Kobayashi (voice), Emmanuel Séjourné(percussion), Jean-Luc Rimey-Meille (percussion), Pierre Rouyer (percussion), Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Michael Lonsdale (actor), Jacques Bachelier (actor), the Danel Quartett, and Mario Caroli (flute), among others.
Michèle’s passion as a teacher allows her to share her knowledge, know-how, and creativity related to the extraordinarily rich art of music. She began her career as an instructor at the school of music in Ecully, followed by the Lyon Conservatory, and then the Hochschule in Freiburg. She has been a professor at the Conservatory of Strasbourg, France, and the Superior Academy since 1994. She was elected Coordinator of the Keyboard Department by her peers in September 2016. She created and coordinated a multi-faceted piano festival (“Piano Week”) at the Strasbourg Conservatory in February 2016. This is now a continuing festival that she has coordinated in 2018 as well. She has recorded a solo CD of the piano music of Ravel, receiving excellent reviews from Classica magazine in France (4 stars), the DNA newspaper in Strasbourg, and other publications.
In May 2018, Michèle Renoul and piano partner Elizabeth Vinciguerra won the Jury Prize and the Public Prize at an international piano competition in Evian, France, for new piano concepts. As a duo she produced a novel arrangement of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for four hands and percussion with the two performers playing piano and percussion simultaneously.
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