Erin Helyard

Erin Helyard has been acclaimed as an inspiring conductor, a virtuosic and expressive performer of the harpsichord and fortepiano, and a lucid scholar who is passionate about promoting discourse between musicology and performance.

Erin Helyard is an Australian conductor and keyboard player whose historically informed performances are distinguished by their theatrical vitality. In 2026 he made his UK conducting debut at the Buxton International Festival, leading The English Concert in Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula. The Guardian described Helyard and the ensemble as “a dream team of baroque dynamism and style.”

As Artistic Director and co-founder of Pinchgut Opera, Helyard has played a defining role in the development of historically informed performance in Australia and in the revival of neglected seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera. Pinchgut received the International Opera Award for Rediscovered Work for Hasse’s Artaserse in 2019. Operas under Helyard’s direction received the Helpmann Award for Best Opera for three consecutive years, from 2015 to 2017, and he has twice received the Helpmann Award for Best Musical Direction, for Handel’s Saul at the Adelaide Festival in 2017 and Artaserse in 2019.

Beyond Pinchgut, Helyard has conducted the Sydney, Adelaide, Tasmanian and Queensland Symphony Orchestras, ACO Collective, the Australian National Academy of Music and the Australian Haydn Ensemble. He has a particularly close and longstanding artistic association with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, appearing with the ensemble as harpsichordist and fortepianist and collaborating extensively with its Artistic Director, Richard Tognetti, in performance and on record. Their album of Beethoven and Mozart violin sonatas won both the ARIA Award for Best Classical Album and the AIR Award for Best Independent Classical Album or EP in 2020.

An acclaimed harpsichordist and fortepianist, Helyard has appeared as conductor and keyboard player on more than thirty recordings. Since 2014, his piano-duet partnership with Stephanie McCallum has explored nineteenth-century four-hand repertoire on historical instruments. He curated Resonance, the Adelaide Festival’s Chamber Landscapes program at UKARIA in 2022, and has been Artist in Residence at Melbourne Recital Centre and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In 2023, he was named Limelight’s Critics’ Choice Australian Artist of the Year.

Helyard graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with first-class honours and the University Medal before completing a master’s degree in fortepiano performance and a PhD in musicology with Tom Beghin at McGill University. His monograph, Clementi and the Woman at the Piano: Virtuosity and the Market for Music in Eighteenth-Century London, was published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series in 2022. He is Associate Professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

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