Lisa Swayne has built a reputation as an excellent musician. She possesses good sight-reading skills and a remarkable musical versatility. This allows her to tackle a range of stylistic genres from classical opera to contemporary music, in roles as diverse as soloist, section leader and chorus member. She has performed across the world from Stornoway to Samoa, broadcast live on TV, internet and radio, and can be heard as a soloist on acclaimed CD recordings.

Born in Winchester, Lisa was a music scholar at Bryanston School in Dorset and she now holds a BMus in performance and a Post Graduate Diploma in Operatic Studies from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She has studied with Lorna Anderson at Bryanston, Margaret Aronson and Patricia Hay at the RSAMD and now studies with Nan Christie.

Awards that Lisa has received include the Margaret Dick Award 2008, the Alfred C. Young medal for recital singing at the Edinburgh Competition Festival 2005, second place in the Jean Highgate Scholarship for Singing Competition (RSAMD 2005) and third place in the RSAMD Governor’s Singing Recital Prize 2007 (chosen from every year of Vocal and Opera Studies at the RSAMD). She has also taken part in masterclasses given by Malcolm Martineau and Mhairi Lawson.

Operatic engagements include: The role of Diana for Kentish Opera’s production of Orpheus in the Underworld (Offenbach), The Methodist preacher in Unexpected Opera’s staged production of Handel’s Messiah and the role of Kristel in James MacMillan’s Parthenogenesis (performed in oxford). In 2009 Lisa was in the chorus for Grange Park Opera’s summer season (Norma, Bellini and The Cunning Little Vixen, Janacek) and she has been asked back to join the chorus again for their 2010 season.

Solo engagements include: Handel’s Messiah (Newcastle Civic centre, Carlisle Cathedral, Manchester cathedral and High Wycombe), Handel’s Samson (with Ulverston Bach choir), a concert of baroque Czech music (with Ulverston Bach choir), Brahms’ Deutches Requiem (Newcastle Civic centre), Bach’s St John Passion (Edinburgh, Carlisle and Dunblane cathedral), Faure’s Requiem (Edinburgh’s McEwan Hall) and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (Chichester). She also performs regularly with the chamber choir Laudibus, Ludos Baroque, Edinburgh Camerata and Vocal Fusion.

Lisa regularly gets called on to fulfil engagements at short notice. These occasions have included singing for the professional chamber choir Tenebrae, solos for the opening of the City Halls in Glasgow (Haydn’s Little Organ Mass), Edinburgh Camerata concerts and both soprano and alto parts for the Glasgow based quartet Vocal Fusion. She also has taken choir rehearsals for The Merchant Voices (Glasgow), Edinburgh Singers and other Glasgow choirs.

As part of her course at the RSAMD Lisa performs selected operatic scenes including the Female Chorus from Britten’s ‘The Rape of Lucretia’, Morgana from Handel’s ‘Alcina’, Miss Jessell from Britten’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, the Vixen from Janacek’s ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ and Semele from Handel’s opera of the same name. She has also been a chorus member for RSAMD productions of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ and Judith Weir’s ‘The Vanishing Bridegroom’.

Lisa has a great interest in contemporary music. In June 2007 she was chosen to be part of an operatic quartet in a new opera “The Island of the Bird Men” composed by David P. Graham and Jean Paul Dessi. The opera was staged in 5 different countries at the same time (she was at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis) and included a live stream from St. Kilda where the opera is based. In the same month Lisa was asked to sing for the Glasgow Science fair with Graham Hair and Scottish Voices. She sang a microtonal song cycle written by Graham especially for the conference and she was also called upon to demonstrate the microtonal scale with the aid of an intonation program on a computer. With these microtonal songs Lisa has sung at the International Computer Music Conference in Belfast, for a lecture at the Royal College of Music and at a conference in Auckland, New Zealand.

Other composers that Lisa has collaborated with include Josephs Hyde (‘In Sunlight’ for soprano and electronics and ‘To The Last Syllable’, a piece for a vocal quartet and electronics), James MacMillan (small piece for a private birthday party), Judith Weir (chorus member for ‘The Vanishing Bridegroom’) and her brother Adam Swayne (‘Three Shakespeare Songs’- a song cycle for soprano and piano). In 2006 Lisa was involved in performing ‘De Stijl’ by Louis Andriessen with the ensemble ‘Thing’ and she has also performed Berberian’s ‘Stripsody’ as part of her course at the RSAMD.

No stranger to early music, Lisa is part of the Mostly Mozart Festival Chorus, based at the Barbican Centre in London, and in May 2008 she was in the chorus of a non-staged production of Mozart’s Idomeneo, touring Lisbon, Amsterdam and London with conductor Fabio Biondi and orchestra Europa Galante.

Lisa was a member of the National Youth Choir of Great Britain (NYC) for eight years, three years of which she was section leader for the Sopranos. In this role she assumed responsibility for conducting warm ups, note learning and vocal health and training for the younger members, skills she continues to use as assistant to conductor to Mike Brewer on choral workshops around the country. With NYC she toured Western Samoa, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore in 2003, and Eastern Europe in 2006 as section leader. Lisa has performed as part of a 10-piece ensemble live on Radio 3’s ‘In Tune’, and she has also broadcast on Classic FM several times. She has been in the National Youth Choir’s chamber choir ‘Laudibus’ for the past four years, participating on the CD ‘The Songs of Songs’ and ‘Scotland at night’ on both of which she has a number of solos. In 2007 Lisa was privileged to perform in front of Her Majesty The Queen as part of ‘Laudibus’ for a private performance at her request at Balmoral.