Soprano Karin Weston specializes in early music, performing a variety of repertoires including troubadour song, Trecento works, Renaissance polyphony, lute song, Handel opera, amongst others. Karin has sung with the medieval ensembles Dialogos, Per-Sonat, Moirai, Concordian Dawn, Rubens Rosa, and Ensemble Parlamento. She is a founding member of the ensemble Trobár, along with Allison Monroe and Elena Mullins, colleagues from her time at Case Western, and she is one of the four core members of the ensemble Contre le Temps, along with Amy Farnell, Julia Marty and Cécile Walsh, colleagues from her time at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. She is also a member of the duo Memor with Elizabeth Sommers, focusing on medieval monophonic song. Both Contre le Temps and Memor were highly lauded in the 2023 Van Wassenaer Competition at the Utrecht Early Music Festival, with Memor receiving the first prize, and Contre le Temps receiving the second prize, Audience Award and the OOM prize. She can be heard on albums with Concordian Dawn, both “Fortuna Antiqua et Ultra” and on the CD accompanying Sarah Kay’s book Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera, as well as on “Wa funde man sament so manic liet?” by Moirai. Some highlights of the 2023-2024 season include a concert on the Freunde Alte Musik Basel series with Ensemble Parlamento, a tour with the Utrecht Early Music Season with Per-Sonat, and a tour of concerts in Cleveland and Chicago with Trobár in collaboration with the Newberry Consort.

In baroque opera, Karin has played a variety of opera characters, from women scorned to cheeky best friends to strapping young men. Her past roles include Procris from Cavalli’s Gli Amore d’Apolo e di Dafne, Proserpina from Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Clorinda from Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, Charite from Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione, Oberto from Handel’s Alcina, Mirtillo from Handel’s Il Pastor Fido, and Orazio from Muzio Scevola by Amadei, Bononcini and Handel. She has been a soloist with the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, and a young artist with the Boston Early Music Festival, understudying the role of Angelica for their production of Steffani’s Orlando Generoso. Karin also studied baroque dance with Julie Andrijeski, and baroque gesture with Deda Cristina Colonna.

Karin began her studies in early music at Case Western Reserve University, where she worked with musicologists Susan McClary, Georgia Cowart, Ross Duffin and Peter Bennett, amongst others and studied voice with Ellen Hargis. Her culminating project for this program was a lecture recital focused on ornamentation in the secular and sacred music of Michel Lambert. Karin was the recipient of Early Music America’s Barbara Thornton Scholarship in 2019, which allowed her to pursue medieval music study in Europe that summer. An article on her travels can be found here. Inspired by her time in Europe, she moved to Basel to study medieval and Renaissance music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, working with Katarina Livljanić as well as Baptiste Romain, Marc Lewon and Corina Marti. She is currently pursuing a degree in pedagogy at the Schola.

Karin grew up overseas in Pakistan, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia, and has also lived in Washington State, Delaware, California, Ohio and New York. She currently resides in Basel, where she loves how she can forgo a car for a bike and trains, float down the Rhine on occasion, enter old spaces that would have heard the original tones of the very music she sings, and be in community with the many early music practitioners of the city, collectively conjuring into existence the reimagined sounds of the past.