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Helen Yorke

Professorial Staff - Vocal Coach & Piano

Music

Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
The Music Faculty
King Charles Court
Old Royal Naval College
Greenwich
London
SE10 9JF

Tel: +44 (0)20 8305 4444

Email: h.yorke@trinitylaban.ac.uk

Helen Yorke

Biography

Critically acclaimed as an edgy and dynamic interpreter, the pianist Helen Yorke performed with Renée Fleming throughout America and Europe for over a decade. Helen trained as a soloist at the RNCM, and then specialised in ensemble playing on scholarships at the RAM and thereafter in Germany, at the Frankfurt and Cologne conservatoires, with Hartmut Hoell, Rainer Hoffmann, and the late Leonard Hokanson. She then lived and worked in New York for a decade, teaching at the Juilliard School, Westminster Choir College in Princeton, and at the Manhattan School of Music.

Helen leads a varied career as a performer and teacher. Her appearances as soloist, and chamber music pianist have taken her to distinguished venues worldwide; such as festivals in Salzburg, Tanglewood, Edinburgh, Buxton and Bayreuth, and to many leading concert hall venues in Oslo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Washington D.C. New York, Paris, Prague, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Brussels, performing a broad and varied repertoire. She has collaborated with several foremost artists, such as Gerald Finley, Sally Burgess, Hilary Hahn, Raphael Wallfisch, Tom Randle, Hans-Peter Blochwitz and Cornelius Hauptmann.

Helen has recorded with the BBC London and Scotland, as well as with the Tanglewood Festival. Her solo concert programmes are created around an innovative, conversational idea, originating from her training as a professional speaker. In these concerts, she re-creates the story of composer’s lives through journals and contemporary accounts, alongside playing performances of their solo compositions. Helen has taken this programme to Japan, the U.SA and to venues around the U.K, including Fairfield Halls, London.

Qualifications/ Educational Background

Helen studied at the Royal Northern College of Music and graduated with honours; then, on a scholarship, she specialised in instrument and vocal ensemble playing at the Royal Academy of Music. Her studies continued with Hartmut Hoell, Rainer Hoffmann and Leonard Hokanson on a German Government scholarship in Frankfurt and Cologne. During that time Helen worked in the voice studios of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Soederstroem and Sena Jurinac, in Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris and London, also participating in master classes with acclaimed pianist Vlado Perlemuter, and collaborating with renowned conductors, the late Sir Georg Solti, and Mr Julius Rudel.

 

Teaching Experience

Helen has held teaching positions at the Julliard School, NY, Westminster Choir College, Princeton, the Manhattan School, NY and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow. In addition she has led numerous master classes throughout the United States, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, and Australia, and directed her own course of coaching for singers and pianist called “The Energy and Dynamics of Performance”.

Awards

Recipient of the ARAM, a diploma awarded by the Royal Academy of Music for the achievemnt of distinction in the music profession.