Kim Leeds, Co-Founder
With her "vivid, deeply satisfying sound" and “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 GRAMMY® award winning ensemble Apollo's Fire, GRAMMY® nominated True Concord Voices and Orchestra, Gramophone award winning ensemble Blue Heron, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Choir, Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Piffaro, Oregon Bach Festival, Bach Society of St. Louis, Les Délices, Art of the Early Keyboard, Bach Akademie of Charlotte, Chicago Master Singers, Cantata Collective, Ensemble Altera, Ad Astra Musical Festival, and the Handel Society of Dartmouth. 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, worked with Philippe Herreweghe as a Britten-Pears Young Artist in their Bach Cantata programme in 2019, and was a semi-finalist in the Lyndon Woodside Oratorio-Solo Competition in 2022.
Ms. Leeds enjoys performing a wide range of repertoire from Ockeghem and Dowland, to Rheinberger and Charles Ives as well as sung premieres of works by James MacMillan, Richard Danielpour, James Kallembach, and Julia Wolfe. As a choral artist, Ms. Leeds has toured with Helmuth Rilling in Eastern Germany as a member of the Weimar Bach Academy and toured Northern Italy and Southern Germany with the Junges Stuttgart Bach Ensemble under the direction of Hans Christoph Rademann. In the US, she has performed with GRAMMY® winning ensembles the Crossing and Apollo’s Fire; GRAMMY® nominated ensembles Seraphic Fire, True Concord, and Clarion Choir; as well as the Oregon Bach Festival, Musica Sacra, Handel and Haydn Society and Ensemble Altera. Ms. Leeds is also a co-founder of the New England based ensemble Filigree.
In her hometown of Boston, Ms. Leeds has appeared as a soloist with the Commonwealth Chorale, Cantata Singers, Music at Marsh Chapel, and the Society for Historically Informed Performance. In addition, she can be heard on the 2017 Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s recording of Jeremy Gill’s “Before the Wresting Tides” and Blue Heron’s “Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Songs” Vol. 1 and 2. Ms. Leeds holds degrees from Mannes College of Music and the Boston Conservatory.
www.kimleeds.com
Christina Kay, Co-Founder
Committed to vibrant expressivity and genuine connection through music, NYC-based soprano Christina Kay enjoys a multifaceted career as an artist, educator, and arts administrator. A sought after multi-genre singer, she has recorded an indie folk album with the Home Port trio, given impromptu performances of bluegrass songs at farmers markets and weddings, convincingly faked being a pop singer as a core member of a cappella sextet The Western Wind, and presented florid solo versions of late Renaissance and early Baroque madrigals with ARTEK Early Music.
Christina has a special interest in enlivening music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras with ornamentation and movement, a passion that led her to co-found Filigree Ensemble in 2022 with mezzo-soprano Kim Leeds. She has particularly enjoyed collaborating with mime Tony Lopresti and the Academy of Sacred Drama (dir. Jeremy Rhizor), bringing dynamic movement to performances of little-known Baroque oratorios, and has had the pleasure of performing Handel’s Messiah—one of her very favorite works—at Carnegie Hall with the MasterWork Chorus and Orchestra, where she ornamented to her heart’s content under director Chris Shepard. As an educator, Christina delights in teaching the next generation of early music specialists as a style coach, most recently at the Baroque Opera Workshop at Queens College.
Above and beyond favorite venues and musical experiences, Christina has had the distinct pleasure of experiencing truly bizarre moments on stage. Most memorably, she was locked in a closet during a performance of Julius Eastman's Macle staged in a coal mine in the Czech Republic, and had to be rescued by climbing a ladder through the ceiling. She has also shared the stage with drones while singing the roles of actress-turned-porn-star Daphne Blueberry and “Sacrilegious Nun” in David Chesky’s La Farranucci; worn foot-tall platform shoes while delivering a semi-tonal Gertrude Stein soliloquy as Lead Singer in Petr Kotik’s Master-Pieces; and contended with bees flying up her pants during a performance of Kamala Sankaram’s Cultivars in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (no people or bees were harmed!).
Beyond the stage, Christina serves as Music Associate for Advancement at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in NYC, where she heads up fundraising for the music program. She has taught private voice and piano lessons for over a decade, and spends a few weeks each summer as a facilitator for adult choral workshops with The Western Wind. In her free time, she is an avid kick boxing fan, enjoys cooking and baking healthy gluten free recipes, walks through as many parks as possible, and occasionally tools around on the alto recorder.
www.christinakaysoprano.com