“CityNews” has been contacted over the weekend by Jessica Westcott, a third-year vocal student, with the exciting news that she has been accepted into the Austrian “Tyrolean Opera Program”, an auditioned and competitive international summer school held in the Tyrolean Alps for three  weeks each  July.

Westcott, a soprano who hails from Parkes NSW is, at 20,  one of the youngest to be accepted into the program. She is also the first Australian to make it in.

“Over three weeks of intensive training, I will be immersed in continuous opera rehearsals, language class, diction coaching, dance and acting classes, as well as business and self-promotion classes, which will teach me valuable skills for a career in the European opera industry,” she says.

Popularly known as TOP, the annual event is the brainchild of American Elizabeth Bachman, who has directed for the Metropolitan Opera and, more recently, for five years, an opera company in Spain. Held in Maurach, Austria, on Lake Achenin in the Tyrolean Alps, it teaches  voice, acting, dance and both the German and English languages.

TOP boasts that it trains  the whole performer.

“How do you climb the stairs gracefully in a hoopskirt? How do you sit while wearing a sword?” the course outline asks rhetorically?  The emphasis is placed on practical skills, but there are also high-level music sessions with conductors and senior coaches from Milan, Munich and Berlin.

At least half the places are reserved for German-language speakers from Austria and Germany, but it no doubt helped that Westcott is in the middle of a double degree in music and European languages at the ANU.

Even so, because she was pessimist about her chances, as until now the focus has been on German speakers and Americans, when she received a Skype call from Bachman to say she was in, she says: “I was so shocked.”

After the shock wore off, it was time to work out how to pay for it. Back in Parkes, the local community rallied around for a fundraising concert that raised  $1500 and now she has also received a substantial grant from the Friends of the School of Music to help with travel costs.

It will come as no surprise to readers to learn that Westcott found out about the program on Facebook while “talking” to fellow singers around the world  about summer schools for singers, sadly lacking in Australia. TOP has been consistently rated in the top three of such courses by singers in the US.

“I kept it to myself for a while,” she told “CityNews”, but when eventually she got around to telling her voice teacher Alan Hicks, he advised to tell other students, too.

As Westcott prepares for her flight to Munich, where all the visiting singers are to be picked up, she knows she still has a hard road ahead. For in the world of opera, to be 20 is to be a baby and serious young singers know the dangers of pushing themselves too far too fast.

She’s a  Mozart-lover, so is excited to find out that the Salzburg Festival is on while she is in Europe, but her  real love is French bel canto singing and she is devoted to the works of Donizetti and Massenet.

And when she is a little older, she tells “CityNews”, the stage rather than the concert platform will be the place for Westcott. “I’ve grown up in theatre and I really love acting… I think in the future audiences will enjoy seeing me.”