Artistic Director, Conductor
Kathryn Whitney is the Founding Artistic Director of SING THE NORTH and Artistic Director of the Sing the North Summer Choral Festival. Kathryn is also Artistic Director of the award-winning treble choir, Ensemble Laude, and Music Director of the Newcombe Singers.
Kathryn is the founding Artistic Director of the Pacific Song Collective (Victoria), the SongArt Performance Research Group (University of London), and the One World Baroque Virtual Orchestra & Chorus (created in 2020 with Music Director, Daniel Taylor). She is past Artistic Director of Via Choralis and past conductor of the German-speaking Victoria Harmony Choir.
Raised in Victoria, she trained at Oxford (DPhil in music aesthetics), the Guildhall School of Music (PGDip Early Music Performance) and the University of Toronto (BA in Music & German). Artist in Residence at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama (Walton Fellow), King’s College, London (Visiting Performance Fellow), and Wolfson College, Oxford (Creative Arts Fellow), she has performed across Canada, the UK, and Europe. Kathryn held a Performance Research Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study, University of London for 5 years, where she worked on a series of song performance projects with colleagues from the Royal College of Music, the Central School for Speech & Drama, London.
Experience as a chorister and soloist includes concerts with Budapest Chamber Opera under Pál Németh, the Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists under Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Munich Bach Choir under Hans-Joerg Albrecht, the Whitstable Choral Society under Canterbury Cathedral Director of Music, David Flood, plus 10 years of weekly singing in Oxford Chapel Choirs. Locally, Kathryn has sung as a soloist with the Sooke Philharmonic, Victoria Choral Society, Victoria Philharmonic Choir, Palm Court Orchestra, and Victoria Baroque, and as a chorister with many choirs around the city.
As a choral clinician for the BC Choral Federation, Kathryn has worked with dozens of amateur and semi-professional choirs across the province. She has prepared symphonic choruses for Steven Devine, Daniel Taylor, Howard Dyck, and Laurence Cummings, including for broadcasts of the London Handel Festival. A champion of new music, Kathryn has performed more than 60 world premieres, the majority of pieces written for her voice. Commissions she has instigated include both solo and choral works now published internationally with Cypress Choral Music, Boosey & Hawkes, and Novello & Co.
Prior to moving over to performance work, Kathryn was a college lecturer in music history, aesthetics, and analysis at Oxford University for 12 years, with concurrent appointments at Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music in London.