Vocal Summer School

Kate joined St Mary’s Music School in August 2022 as Music Department Manager and was appointed as Head of Voice in 2024, leading Scotland’s only full-time Vocal Programme for school-aged pupils. Having graduated from both the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy Music, Kate has spent the last 9 years working as a professional opera singer. After completing her formal education, Kate went on to become a member of Studio Opéra de Lyon, France, where she discovered a love for French repertoire and learnt to speak the language fluently. She is also a proud Samling Artist and works with the Samling Academy.  

Recent operatic highlights include Mezzo Soloist in Scottish Opera’s Autumn Highlights Tour, Dorabella (Cosi fan tutte by Mozart) and Carmen (Carmen by Bizet) for Diva Opera, The Woman (The Soldier’s Return by Marcos Fernandez-Barrero) for Opera Sunderland and Charles Grey (Georgiana compiled by Mark Tatlow) for Buxton Opera Festival. For Opéra de Lyon, Katherine has sung the roles of Witness 2/Singer 2/Woman 2 (Lessons in Love and Violence by George Benjamin), Tisbe (La Cenerentola by Rossini) and Pippetto (Donizetti’s Viva la Mamma!). Katherine also sang Pippetto (Donizetti’s Viva la Mamma!) for Grand Théâtre de Genève, Tisbe (La Cenerentola by Rossini) in the Edinburgh International Festival and Cherubino (The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart) for English Touring Opera as well as premiering the role of Beauty in Beauty and the Seven Beasts by The Opera Story, a role which was written for her.   

On the concert platform, recent highlights have included the UK Premier of Is A Rose by Caroline Shaw with the Royal Northern Sinfonia as well as concerts with Brandenburg Choral Festival, Southern Cathedrals Festival and Opera de Lyon.   

Kate has always had a passion for music education. She has taught singing and music theory privately and in schools since 2010 as well as being heavily involved in outreach projects with companies such as Samling Institute for Young Artists and Edinburgh International Festival. In her role at St Mary’s Music School, Kate hopes to bring her musical and professional experiences to the next generation of artists so they can emerge into the industry with all the tools they need to succeed.   

Anna has performed internationally as a soloist and chamber musician and was one of the first students to be awarded a double Bachelors degree from Maastricht Conservatoire in the Netherlands, studying both Piano and Music Theory.

Anna also graduated with a Masters and Artist Diploma from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), studying under Aaron Shorr. Anna is interested in unearthing hidden treasures of the classical repertoire, with a focus on the Scottish composer Ronald Center, resulting in international lecture-recitals, including at the London International Piano Symposium and Musica Scotica Conference. She founded the Ad Libitum Collective, an ensemble at the RCS that explores the possibilities of free improvisation.

The group collaborates closely with dancers, and this has led to a multidisciplinary performance as part of the annual Piano Festival at RCS. As a solo improviser, she represented the RCS at the METRIC Improvisation Conference in Leipzig in 2023. A recipient of the Cross Trust, Anna was awarded the Falkirk Civic Trust ‘Young Personality of the Year’ and, alongside soprano Rosie Lavery, she works regularly with the charity Live Music Now Scotland, bringing music to those who need it most.

Based in the North East, Miranda Wright is a Vocal Professor at The Royal College of Music, a masterclass leader for Samling Academy, Head of Classical Singing at Newcastle University and teaches many undergraduates from Durham University and other singers from the North East. 

She has taught on Eton Choral courses with Ralph Allwood, for the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and is in demand as a leader of masterclasses .

Miranda studied with Ann Lampard and then at the Royal Northern College of Music with Caroline Crawshaw, where she was a mutiple prize-winner, and performed for several years, taking professional roles, such as Countess (Figaro), Governess (Turn of the Screw), Amadigi (Amadigi di Gaula), Romilda (Xerxes). She was a Peter Moores Scholar whilst at college and a Samling Scholar in1999. She appeared as a singer on BBC 2's Opera Works with Jonathan Miller. She was subsequently taught by Paul Farrington, as well as having coaching Malcolm Martineau and Barbara Bonney, amongst others.

One important aspect of Miranda's teaching is the development of performance opportunities for her students. Apart from regular participation in music festivals, Miranda has organised concerts for her ensemble "The Miranda Wright Singers", performing a wide range of repertory and developing confident performance skills as a soloist or in small ensembles. The groups'  production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and  Dido and Aeneas performed at The Sage, Gateshead, were very well recieved and Miranda has gone on to direct Samling Academy's acclaimed productions of Albert Herring in 2013 and L'enfant et les Sortliges in 2015 and Blow’s opera Venus and Adonis with the Dunedin Consort under John Butt in 2018.

Independently, she devised and directed Tell me the Truth about Love? - a staged art song and spoken text progamme at The Witham, Barnard Castle in 2014.

These performances give her pupils vital experience that they can take with them as they develop their careers and prepare for auditions. The performance opportunities are built up on two principles: the proper, rigorous training of young voices for technical confidence, at the appropriate level for their age; and professional performance based on confident self-presentation. 

Héloïse Bernard is a classically trained Soprano and French Language Coach. She holds a Masters in French Language and Literature from the Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, specialised in the French Enlightenment, and pursued her musical training at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. 

Héloïse regularly performs as a soloist, with a particular interest in Early Music and the French Mélodie repertoire, receiving coaching on that particular repertoire from Anne Grapotte, Véronique Gens, Michèle Command, Michel Piquemal, François Le Roux and Helen Abbott. 

Mentored by Prof. Chris Underwood in teaching interpretation of French melodie, she’s regularly invited to teach the French repertoire performance class at the Royal Northern College of Music.  

She collaborates with the French Institute of Scotland through workshops on French phonetics and pronunciation.  

As a Language Coach, she has worked under the supervision of Sonja Nerdrum on Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Le dialogue des Carmélites, by Poulenc, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She was the Language coach for the recent production of Les Enfants Terribles by Philip Glass.  

Helen Lawson was born in Northumberland and studied singing at the Royal College of Music and the National Opera Studio in London. She was awarded several scholarships including a Sir James Caird Travelling Scholarship, which enabled her to pursue further studies with Prof. Erik Werba at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, and Prof. Konrad Richter at the Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart.

Helen has appeared as soloist in opera houses at home and abroad, including English National Opera; City of Birmingham Touring Opera; English Touring Opera; De Vlaamse Opera Antwerpen and Landestheater Thüringen. Among the roles she has performed are: Butterfly (Puccini: Madama Butterfly), Countess Almaviva (Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro), Pamina (Mozart: Die Zauberfloete); Governess (Britten: Turn of the Screw); Tatiana (Tchaikovsky: Eugen Onegin), Echo (Richard Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos) Solo Blumenmädchen (Wagner: Parsifal) and Senta (Wagner: The Flying Dutchman).

She has appeared as soloist in concerts and oratorio, including performances of Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ and Verdi’s ‘Requiem’ at the Royal Albert Hall, conducted by Sir David Willcocks. She has given song recitals in the UK and abroad.

Helen trained as a breathing pedagogue (Osenberg/Parow) in Germany and for several years attended Richard Miller’s Institute of Vocal Performance Pedagogy at Oberlin College, USA. She is a certified CoreSinging teacher (Meribeth Dayme) and in 2011 she was awarded a Walter Hines Page Scholarship by the English Speaking Union, which enabled her to visit several institutions in the States as part of a research project looking at the American approach to vocal training.

Having taught singing in German universities (Bayreuth and Bamberg), Helen moved to Glasgow in 2002 to take up the post of Lecturer in Vocal Studies at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). Alongside individual vocal coaching at post-graduate and under-graduate levels, Helen teaches classes in phonetics, Italian and German repertoire. For several years she was Course Leader of the RCS Classical Singing Summer School. Helen is also a visiting voice coach at the University of Aveiro in Portugal.

Helen learnt to play the Northumbrian pipes while she was living in Germany and she enjoys bringing the sounds of her Geordie roots to her life in Scotland.