KATHERINE KAUFMAN POSNER - Teacher of Beautiful Singing


After winning the Metropolitan Opera National Auditions at the age of twenty, Katherine Kaufman Posner was called by Metropolitan Opera Conductor Kurt Adler, “One of the voices of her generation.” She went on to receive grants from the Weyerhauser Paper Company, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, the Borden Company and the Liederkranz Society, and made her professional debut with the Santa Fe Opera. As a member of the Metropolitan Opera Studio, she worked with Maestro Adler, as well as other prominent musicians and coaches, such as Martin Rich, John Moriarty, Anton Coppola, Margaret Singer and Emerson Buckley. Eminent stage directors with whom she worked include Henry Butler, James Lucas, Bliss Hebert, Carlton Gauld and Carolyn Lockhart. She performed under the baton of  Boris Goldovsky, Igor Stravinsky, John Crosby, Robert Craft, Jose Serebrier, Emerson Buckley, Anton Coppola among others.  She has sung with such artists as Igor Gorin, Betty Allen, Julian Patrick, Donald Gramm, John Reardon, Mary Curtis-Verna, Beatrice Krebs, Franco Iglesias.

She has performed with the San Francisco Spring Opera at the War Memorial Auditorium, and also at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. She sang four seasons of trans-continental tours with the Goldovsky Opera Theatre as leading soprano while completing her Master’s degree in opera theatre at the Manhattan School of Music. She was a frequent recitalist and oratorio singer in the New York area.

Mrs. Posner was a student of the world-renowned Cornelius L. Reid, author of The Free Voice and Bel Canto: Principles and Practices. She is considered a disciple of Reid, re-discoverer of the principles of the Bel Canto tradition.  Her teaching enables the singer’s voice to be as nature intended, to function correctly, and therefore to be beautiful. The teaching of Bel Canto combines 400 years of experience in singing practice with modern insights into physiology and psychology and is an efficient approach to vocal development and correction of long standing vocal problems. 

Katherine Kaufman Posner has thirty-five years of teaching experience, including appointments to the faculties of Duke University, Langston University, and The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she continued her active performing career in faculty recitals, chamber music, and opera. She later opened successful teaching studios in Miami and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a thoroughgoing stage director and teacher of acting, as well as a professional singer and voice teacher. Additionally, she is an experienced lecturer in voice production and an expert in coaching musical styles, teaching English and foreign language diction, acting and stage movement.

Possessing a pioneering spirit, Katherine Kaufman Posner was co-founder in the 1970s of the North Carolina Lyric Opera which she served as Artistic Director. At that time, she was on Governor James B. Hunt’s Cultural Advisory Committee, Co-Chairing the Opera Policy Sub-Committee.