Catherine Le Saunier is an established choral conductor who has been working in the Greater Montreal area since 2005. She currently directs the Harmonie vocale de St-Hyacinthe and the Chœur de la Montagne in Belœil, where she has been selected to succeed Julien Proulx at the end of the 2021-2022 season.
In recent years, she has conducted or collaborated with La clique vocale, the choirs and orchestras of the F.A.C.E. school, the McGill Conservatory Singers, the Chœur classique de Montréal and the Institut canadien d’art vocal de Montréal.
In 2015, Catherine founded the Chœur du moment – Montréal, a variable-geometry ensemble that became Chloé Sainte-Marie’s choir-in-residence and participated in various recordings and unusual performances.
Originally a cellist trained at the Conservatoire de musique de Québec, Catherine Le Saunier has made a point of pursuing a parallel career as a performer, teacher and conductor.
She teaches pop cello at UQÀM and jazz cello at Cégep de St-Laurent. Indeed, it is on the pop, jazz and improvised scenes that she has developed her expertise as a performer, both on stage and in the studio, with artists from the Canadian pop scene over the past 20 years.
Catherine began her conducting career at music camps and in elementary and high schools across the province, before completing a Master’s degree in choral conducting under the supervision of Robert Ingari at the Université de Sherbrooke in 2013. Constantly striving to perfect her skills, she has taken part in various conducting masterclasses with choirmasters Bernard Têtu from Lyon, Nestor Zadoff from Buenos Aires, Catherine Simonpietri from Paris and Simon Carrington from London, as well as orchestra conductors Gilles Auger in Lévis and Grzegorz Nowak during a workshop in Berlin in 2019.
Catherine Le Saunier’s wide-ranging experience as a teacher, youth and adult conductor and performer has given her a broad overview of Quebec’s amateur and professional music scene, making her a valued collaborator, conductor and musician among her peers and choristers.