Soprano Katharine Dain has been praised by the New York Times for her “rich tone,” “deep emotion,” and “lovely, passionate” stage presence. Of a recent performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, senior critic Allan Kozinn said “the ensemble’s engaging soprano gave as graceful, and as intense, a performance of Schoenberg’s stylized vocal line as you could want.” Originally from North Carolina, she has a natural affinity for the operas and oratorios of Handel, Bach, Purcell, and Mozart, but her diverse repertoire spans six centuries, encompassing music of Monteverdi, Schütz, Haydn, Brahms, Verdi, Wolf, Debussy, Berg, Strauss, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Barber, Weill, Berio, and numerous contemporary composers. On the operatic stage, her roles include Fiordiligi (Così fan tutte, Harvard University), Calisto (La Calisto, Amherst Early Music Festival), Second Woman/Second Witch (Dido and Aeneas, Mark Morris Dance Group), Acis (Acis and Galatea, Mannes College), and several premieres of roles in contemporary operas.
While an undergraduate at Harvard University, Ms. Dain earned a B.A., cum laude, while pursuing various interests: choral singing, conducting, composition, classical radio, opera, and co-founding and singing with the acclaimed Cambridge Early Music Project. At graduation she was awarded the prestigious John Knowles Paine Fellowship from the Harvard Music Department which allowed her to enroll in a master’s program in Early Music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. There she studied voice with Margaret Humphrey Clark and historical performance practice with some of the top names in British early music, including Emma Kirkby, Nancy Argenta, Rachel Podger, Stephen Preston, Andrew Carwood, and Peter Phillips. She worked frequently as an oratorio soloist and free-lance ensemble singer, including engagements with the Parley of Instruments, Brighton Early Music Festival, and the choirs of St. Bartholomew-the-Great and St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate, with whom she appeared on the BBC. Ms. Dain also developed a relationship with acclaimed recitalist and new-music specialist Sarah Walker CBE, presenting 20th- and 21st-century recital repertoire as part of the Creative Voices contemporary music program.
Ms. Dain then moved to New York City to study at Mannes College of Music with Ruth Falcon and Amy Burton. She has been a featured performer on many Mannes concerts, including the 2008 Beethoven Festival concert in Weill Hall, and has also developed an active performance career in the city as soloist with ensembles such as the Collegiate Chorale, Mark Morris Dance Group, New York City Ballet, New York Virtuoso Singers, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and the New England Baroque Soloists, in venues including Carnegie Hall (Weill Hall and Zankel Hall), Lincoln Center (New York State Theater and Bruno Walter Auditorium), the Stone, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the French Consulate, St. Paul’s Chapel, and St. John the Divine. She is increasingly in demand as an interpreter of the contemporary repertoire and has premiered pieces by composers including Stockhausen and Gervasoni under the auspices of the Joy in Singing Foundation, the Talea Ensemble, and the New York Miniaturist Ensemble. She has co-founded two ensembles that perform frequently in the city: Lunatics at Large, a contemporary chamber group (Pierrot instrumentation) called “young, energetic, and highly polished” by senior Times critic Allan Kozinn, and Callisto Ascending, a period-instrument group that has performed at the Boston Early Music Festival, the Gotham Early Music Scene Showcase and Midtown Concert Series in New York.
A recipient of Mannes’s Marcus Wahl Award for excellence in performance, the Bev Sellers Memorial Scholarship, and winner of the Guildhall Baroque Orchestra Concerto Competition, Ms. Dain has worked in masterclasses with Dawn Upshaw (Marilyn Horne Foundation masterclasses 2008), Graham Johnson, Martin Katz, Jake Heggie, John Harbison, John Musto, Craig Smith, Wolfgang Holzmair, Wolfram Rieger, Meribeth Bunch, Julianne Baird, and Paul Sperry. This summer she will be a Steans Fellow at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL, working with such faculty members as Brian Zeger, Christoph Eschenbach, Matthias Goerne, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, as well as giving concerts of Schoenberg, Berio, Purcell, and Handel in festivals along the east coast.