Kim Leeds, Co-Founder
With her “rich, smooth mezzo soprano”, Kim Leeds engages audiences in her exploration of life’s essence through music. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Bach Akademie Charlotte, Les Délices, American Bach Soloists Academy, L’Akadémie du Roi Soleil, Handel Society of Dartmouth, Bach Society of St. Louis, the Tafelmusik Baroque Chamber Orchestra and Choir, the Oregon Bach Festival Discovery Series, GRAMMY® nominated True Concord Voices and Orchestra, and Gramophone award winning ensemble Blue Heron. Over the years, Ms. Leeds has garnered multiple accolades including winning the Tafelmusik Vocal Competition in 2016, attending the Carmel Bach Festival as a Virginia Best Adams Fellow in 2017, was a finalist for the American Prize in Art Song in 2019, and that summer worked with Philippe Herreweghe as a Britten-Pears Young Artist.
As a choral artist, Ms. Leeds has worked with Helmuth Rilling in the Weimar Bach Academy and toured with the Junges Stuttgart Bach Ensemble under the direction of Hans Christoph Rademann. In the US, she has performed with the Oregon Bach Festival, Handel and Haydn Society, GRAMMY® nominated ensemble Seraphic Fire, GRAMMY® winning ensemble the Crossing, and this season joins the GRAMMY® nominated Clarion Choir and GRAMMY® winning ensemble Apollo’s Fire.
Christina Kay, Co-Founder
Soprano Christina Kay enjoys a multi-faceted career singing everything from opera, oratorio, and musical theater, to early, contemporary, and folk music. This season is her second as a core member of The Western Wind, an internationally acclaimed vocal sextet devoted to the special beauty and variety of a cappella music. In October 2023, the group premiered Cultivars by Kamala Sankaram in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where a bee made a surprise appearance up one of Christina’s pant legs during the performance (this is the last time she will ever wear wide-legged pants when singing in a garden). In addition to crooning with bees, Christina has appeared as soprano soloist in Handel’s Messiah with MasterWork Chorus and Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and has been seen on the opera stage in premieres by David Chesky (Daphne, La Farranucci) and Timothy Lee Miller (Annabelle, The Bird Lady). She made her European debut at the 2018 New Opera Days Ostrava Festiva, where she was accidentally locked in the closet of a renovated coal mine during a show and had to climb through the ceiling via a ladder to escape. She returned to the Czech Republic later that year to reprise the role of Lead Singer in Petr Kotik’s Master-Pieces (where she was very fortunately not locked in a closet again). Christina regularly appears with ARTEK Early Music, and has a vested interest in helping singers explore and popularize diminution practice amongst American early music ensembles and audiences.
In addition to her active performance schedule, Christina is the part-time Music Associate for Advancement at St. Ignatius Loyola in NYC, and is Co-Director and Baroque Vocal Specialist for the Baroque Opera Workshop at Queens College. christinakaysoprano.com