Winston Purdy

Department of Performance (Schulich School of Music)

Biography

Winston Purdy began his early musical training on the clarinet and played a movement of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra conducted by the legendary Wilfrid Pelletier. He was also a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. His advanced musical studies were in Composition at McGill University, where he obtained the degree of B.Mus. in 1964. His teachers were Helmut Blume, Istvan Anhalt, Marvin Duchow and Alexander Brott.

Extracurricular voice studies with the distinguished baritone and teacher Jan Simons led to a career change and further voice study in Frankfurt-Am-Main, Germany, and London, England. In Frankfurt, Prof. Purdy was a soloist under Helmut Rilling in the Bach Magnificat, and gave several performances of contemporary music. In London, he studied privately with Joy Mammen of the Royal Academy of Music, sang with the choir of St. Paul's Cathedral, and took part in a master class with Gerald Moore.

Returning to Montreal in 1971, Prof. Purdy established himself as a voice teacher and performer. He joined the Faculty of Music in 1973. As a performer, he has sung the major oratorio roles for baritone and bass, given many song recitals devoted to one composer or one poet, including performances of the three song cycles of Schubert, and much contemporary music, including several premieres.

In 1975-76, he took a leave of absence from McGill to obtain a master's degree in Voice Performance and Literature from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. In recent years, Prof. Purdy has attended pedagogy courses given by Richard Miller at Oberlin Conservatory.

At McGill, Winston Purdy teaches studio voice and vocal pedagogy, and established the Vocal Techniques courses for Music Education students. His students are singing internationally and among his more prominent former students are Dominique Labelle, L.Mus.'86, a Metropolitan Opera auditions winner, who has recently sung the roles of Gabriel and Eve in Haydn's The Creation at Carnegie Hall with the late Robert Shaw, and Marzelina in Fidelio with Kurt Mazur; Althea-Maria Papoulias, B.Mus.'89, winner of the Maria Callas Memorial Scholarship and the Belvedere Competition, who is now a member of both the Vienna Statsoper and Volksoper, performing such roles as Musetta in La Boheme, Liu in Turandot, and Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus.