Winner of the 2020 Credit Suisse Young Artist Award, Valentine Michaud perfectly combines musical finesse and impeccable technique with an extraordinary artistic vision. Her drive to push boundaries and explore new horizons has established Valentine her unique place in the ever-evolving world of classical music.

The first saxophonist to appear as soloist with the Wiener Philharmoniker, she made her debut under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Lucerne Festival in 2022, performing the saxophone premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Peacock Tales. Recently, she has been guest soloist with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the United States Navy Band, the Sinfonia Varsovia and the Phiharmonie Zuidnederlands, with whom she recorded the Peacock Tales for Outhere Music.

Convinced of the richness of collaborations with other art forms and seeking to develop new concert formats, Valentine is one of the founding members of SIBJA, a collective of artists in which she is artistic director with her brother Emmanuel Michaud, performs as an instrumentalist and designs the costumes. SIBJA creates performances merging painters, dancers, musicians and live electronic music in a variety of unique settings, such as the Waiting for Amon trilogy (Nico Kaufman Prize 2018) and short film Le Dialogue de l'Ombre Double.

Keen to expand the expressive range of the saxophone, Valentine has commissioned a number of works with pianist Akvilé Sileikaité, a partner in her Akmi duo with whom she performs all over the world (KKL Luzern, Wigmore Hall, la Cappella St Petersbourg, Wiener Musikverein) and produced the disc "Beyond the Wall" in 2023 (Avie Records). Since 2022, she has been performing as a duo with her brother Gabriel Michaud on percussion. They are recording their first album, Oiseaux de Paradis, to be released by Mirare in 2024. This season they will also make their debut as a duo at the Folle Journée in Tokyo and Warsaw.

Born in Paris in 1993, Valentine Michaud studied saxophone and piano in Nantes before moving to Switzerland at the age of 16, where in 2013 she obtained a bachelor's degree in saxophone from the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne in Pierre-Stéphane Meugé's class, alongside a bachelor's degree in musicology from the Sorbonne University in Paris. After a first master's degree in instrumental pedagogy, she continued her training with a second master's degree as a soloist at the Zürcher Hochschule der Kunste under Professor Lars Mlekusch. Valentine currently teaches at the Conservatoire populaire de musique de Genève.