BIOGRAPHY

Caroline Dowdle is the Head of Opera at the Verbier Festival Atelier Lyrique. Much in demand as a pianist and vocal coach, she works regularly with singers on the Jette Parker Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and is a member of the vocal faculty at the Royal College of Music in London. She has also been a guest coach on the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Programme, at the Estonian National Opera and in Beijing, together with regular visits to Berlin as a faculty member of the annual summer Dramatic Lyric Voices course. In the UK, she has a long association with Samling Institute, where she is a leader in its masterclass weeks, alongside her role as Music Director of the Samling Academy, a masterclass programme for young singers aged 14-21.

Born in Cape Town, Caroline’s performing career began at an early age. She studied at the University of Cape Town, before moving to England to study solo piano at the Royal Northern College of Music. After two years as a Junior Fellow in Manchester, she moved to London to pursue a freelance career and has been based there ever since. She has performed widely in the UK and Europe, giving recitals with singers and instrumentalists at the Royal Opera House, the South Bank and Wigmore Hall in London, at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and in Paris (for Radio France), Madrid, Valencia and Moscow. Amongst her many musical collaborations are long-standing partnerships with baritones Sir Thomas Allen and Sir Simon Keenlyside.

Her busy diary will include new ventures for 2024, with masterclasses scheduled at the Internationalen Meistersinger Akademie in Neumarkt, and a first visit to New Zealand to work with the Young Artists at the TANZOS conservatoire.