Amanda Cole

Amanda Cole, Mezzo-soprano

Biography for Amanda Cole, Mezzo-soprano

Amanda has been singing Baroque music since she was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne. She has performed in small ensembles with some of Australia’s leading orchestras, including the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Amanda’s more intimate performances have included Australian, New Zealand and world premieres, and she is active in promoting new music by collaborating with local composers and premiering works written for her. In 2011 she received a Creative New Zealand grant for a commission of a song cycle by poet, Rachel Bush, and composer, Dame Gillian Whitehead.

Amanda has won many awards and scholarships, including a Churchill Fellowship in 2000, and was a recent prize-winner in Melbourne’s Mietta Song Recital Award.

As Artist in Residence at Jack Straw Productions in Seattle, USA, Cole recorded a CD of rarely heard Portuguese art songs, released in April 2009. In the prestigious international Journal of Singing, Gregory Berg claimed that anyone who cares about art song needs to own this wonderful recording. “The songs themselves are fascinating and they are given exemplary performances, but it is the comprehensive attention to detail in other matters of presentation that makes this recording so uncommonly satisfying.”

In Dunedin she teaches Alexander-Technique-informed voice and performance skills both privately and at the Higher Education Development Centre of the University of Otago. She studies with Cathy Madden, who is based in Seattle. She is currently completing a PhD on the teaching of performance.