Annabella Waite

Annabella has lived and worked as a singing teacher in Cornwall for over 30 years. She originally trained at the Legat School for a career in ballet. However, after further education in the West Country she gained a place on the Performers’ Course at the Guildhall School of Music and studied singing with Oda Slobadskaya and later, with Reinhold Gerhardt.  She initially performed in London’s West End and, after marriage, went to live in Canada where she continued studies at the Toronto Conservatory with Ernesto Vinci and worked as a freelance soloist/recitalist and also as a member of the Festival Singers of Canada under the conductorship of Elmer Eisler.

She and her family then went to live in the Cayman Islands where she began to teach music at the invitation of Berkeley University.

After four years she returned to the United Kingdom to live in Cornwall where she remarried, and with the encouragement of her teacher Pamela Faulkner, has established a teaching practice which has encompassed the preparation of boys for choral scholarships, peripatetic voice teaching in local schools, voice therapy work and the preparation of advanced pupils for professional work and for further education at universities and national colleges of music.  She has combined this with singing oratorio and opera in the South West of England and is a founder member of Duchy Opera for whom she has designed sets and costumes for the last fifteen years.  As Education Co-ordinator for the company she has also taken opera workshops into West Country schools, has acted as administrator to advanced singers’ workshop weekends with Mollie Petrie, Richard Jackson and Russell Smythe, Peter Harrison and Mary Hammond and has conducted her own workshops for locally based choirs. In conjunction with The National Trust, she has also organised three masterclasses with Benjamin Luxon.  She completed the CT ABRSM course in 1998/99 and is currently researching and compiling material for the publication of a Glossary of Musical Terms for Singers.  Annabella has also taught voice training as part-time lecturer at The Combined University of Cornwall for the postgraduate MA course of Broadcast Journalism.

Annabella was awarded the MBE in the 2004 New Year’s Honours List for her services to Duchy Opera Trust and the Community of Cornwall.