Lorraine Campet | Double bassist

The French musician combines a leading orchestral position at the Paris Opera with a solo career built around an instrument whose lyrical possibilities deserve closer attention.

Lorraine Campet’s mother is a singer, her father a pianist. When she talks about playing the double bass, she returns to the voice. That connection helps explain an unusual choice on her debut album: five songs by Josephine Lang, a nineteenth-century German composer, sung here without words.

“I seek that vocal quality; it guides me,” Campet told Version Femina in a 2025 interview. Her arrangements give the double bass responsibility for carrying music originally shaped around a singer’s breath and a poet’s text. It is a revealing starting point for a musician whose career moves between supporting an orchestra and holding a listener’s attention on her own.

In March 2025, Campet won the Instrumental Soloist Revelation award at France’s Victoires de la Musique Classique. France Musique reported that it was the first time the double bass had been rewarded at the event. By then, she already held the position of principal solo double bassist with the Paris Opera Orchestra, which she took up in October 2024. The public breakthrough followed years of professional experience.

An early start, on two instruments

Campet chose the double bass at around five, attracted by its appearance and physical presence. In the Version Femina interview, she described an instrument large enough to feel like a companion, recalling children who tell her that playing it looks like giving it a hug.

The attachment developed into an exceptionally early professional path. At 17, she joined the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France as co-principal double bass, remaining there for seven years. She completed her double bass master’s degree at the Paris Conservatoire in 2016, followed by a violin degree in 2019. Further studies with Petru Iuga in Mannheim broadened her training.

The violin became a parallel performing life. Campet played it in the Quatuor Confluence, while her double bass chamber work includes the string quintet Smoking Joséphine. Moving between those settings places her inside different musical relationships: a quartet’s closely shared conversation, a quintet’s foundation, an orchestra’s collective sound. Her career has developed across those roles rather than through a single succession of solo appearances.

A repertoire shaped around song

Released by Aparté on 16 May 2025, Âmes sœurs, recorded with pianist Nathanaël Gouin, offers a clear statement of her interests. Its programme brings together Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, Op. 73, and Beethoven’s seven variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Lang’s songs appear between these larger works, creating a recurring vocal thread.

According to the label, Campet prepared her transcription of the Schubert sonata from the original manuscript. The programme’s organising idea is expressive range: how the double bass can sustain a melody, articulate a character and take on music familiar through other instrumental voices. Including Lang also brings a less familiar composer into a programme anchored by established names.

Campet’s understanding of the instrument remains rooted in ensemble playing. In a 2024 interview with La French Touch, she recalled learning that a double bassist must listen first, providing the foundation and support on which other musicians depend. In the same conversation, she singled out the tenor Bruce Ford’s Mozart singing for its combination of technical command, emotion and restraint. Those interests suggest a useful way into her solo work: listen for the relationship between a clearly projected individual voice and the attention to others that orchestral playing demands.

For listeners discovering Campet, Âmes sœurs provides a more illuminating introduction than a list of prizes. Its choices reveal a musician interested in what her instrument can say through melody—and in the songs it can bring into its repertoire.

Where to find Lorraine Campet
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