Erin Helyard has been acclaimed as an inspiring conductor and a virtuosic and expressive performer of the harpsichord and fortepiano. He graduated in harpsichord performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with first-class honours and the University Medal, and completed his Masters in fortepiano performance and a PhD in musicology with Tom Beghin at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal. His monograph Clementi and the Woman at the Piano: Virtuosity and the Market for Music in Eighteenth-Century London was published by Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment in 2022.
As Artistic Director and co-founder of the celebrated Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes (Sydney), Erin has forged new standards of excellence in operatic performance in Australia. The company won Best Rediscovered Opera for Hasse’s Artaserse at the 2019 International Opera Awards in London, and Pinchgut’s opera film A Delicate Fire won Best Australian Feature Film at the Sydney Women’s International Film Festival in 2021. Operas under his direction were named Best Opera at the Helpmann Awards for three consecutive years (2015–2017), and he has himself received two Helpmann Awards for Best Musical Direction: one for a fêted revival of Saul at the Adelaide Festival, the other for Hasse’s Artaserse. Together with Richard Tognetti, Erin won both an ARIA and an AIR Award for Best Classical Album.
A central member of the award-winning Ensemble Caprice in Montreal for six years, Erin has, since returning to Australia, collaborated with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Musica Viva, and the Australian String Quartet. He has distinguished himself as a conductor in dynamic performances with the Sydney, Adelaide, Tasmanian, and Queensland Symphony Orchestras, Opera Australia, ACO Collective, the Australian National Academy of Music, and the Australian Haydn Ensemble. As a duo partner he has performed and recorded with Avi Avital, Melissa Farrow, David Greco, Stephanie McCallum, James Morley, and Richard Tognetti. He has been recognised with a Music and Opera Singers Trust Achievement Award for his contribution to the arts in Australia, has held residencies at the Melbourne Recital Centre and with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and was named Limelight’s Critics’ Choice Australian Artist of the Year.
Erin is an Associate Professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and appears courtesy of Pinchgut Opera.
