Michel Marc Gervais

    Conductor Michel Marc Gervais was trained in piano, voice and vocal coaching at the University of Alberta and at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts in Canada. He studied choral conducting with Eric Ericson in Vienna and Stockholm, orchestral conducting at the Paris Opera, and was further influenced through contact with Pierre Boulez, Leonard Bernstein, Nicolaus Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and Andrew Parrott. Founder of Pro Coro Canada, one of Canada’s three professional choirs, Gervais has established several choir schools internationally, including Schola Cantorum at Alberta College (Edmonton, Canada), the National Choir School at the Royal Chapel of the Palace of Versailles and the new choir school at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. In 2004, he became the successor to the renowned conductor Michel Corboz at the prestigious Geneva Conservatory of Music in Switzerland, one of the top music schools in the world, where he directed the choral conducting program. Gervais also served as Director of Choral Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara from 1995 until his retirement in 2016. With some 700 concert performances, 250 radio and television broadcasts, 950 master classes and 20 disc recordings to his credit, he has collaborated with choral and orchestral ensembles world-wide, including in Austria, Canada, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. In recognition of his contributions to the choral field, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France and he received the Richard Eaton Award of Distinction, a life achievement award bestowed by the Alberta Choral Federation in Canada in 2009.