Check out this video: "Pathfinder" - for solo 5 string violin
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New video: "Rabo de Nube" - with vocalist Sylvie Bourban and guitar player Michael Borgida
Helen cannot remember life without music. Having started the piano at age 4, and taken up the violin at 6, she won a scholarship to the prestigious Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, England when she was 8. Here, two influential teachers, Heather Slade-Lipkin on piano (who can trace her teaching lineage back to Beethoven and Lizst!) and Nannie Jamieson on violin (a pupil of Carl Flesch) encouraged her to take her performing diplomas early, the piano ARCM at 18 followed by the violin LGSM at 19. She spent the next few years furthering her musical education at Cambridge University, gaining an MA(Hons) and a PGCE. Since childhood, she has played in numerous concerts – in many forms, from solo piano recitals, (also performing Beethoven's First Piano Concerto at Cambridge), to violin recitals, duos, quartet, orchestral concerts, also spending two summers working in Italy with the Montepulciano Festival Orchestra. She worked for a short while at the Yehudi Menuhin School, then as a violin teacher for the States of Jersey in the Channel Islands; conducting the Jersey Intermediate Orchestra, and commissioning a Suite for it, by the English composer Patrick Stanford – whilst also continuing her performing, giving recitals broadcast by Radio Jersey. Returning to the mainland in 1996, she continued teaching at the renowned Bedales Junior School, and St Catherine’s School near Guildford, combining this with freelance orchestral work, and regular string quartet performances, in venues such as Leeds Castle, National History Museum, the Houses of Parliament, London, and at occasions such as the wedding of “Posh Spice†Victoria, to David Beckham in Ireland, working with the singer Sam Brown, and leading a string quartet for Jon Lord (Deep Purple) performing his music in Zermatt, Switzerland.
After hearing a jazz fiddler (Mike Piggott) in a Sussex pub one summer night, Helen realized that there were other dimensions to music that were hugely lacking in all her previous education, so – inspired to change direction, she was soon performing and recording with the jazz pianist Mike Hatchard, and Herbie Flowers (Sky, T Rex), and with guitarist Dylan Kay. Pursuing this new musical quest lead her to Boston where she won scholarships to study jazz violin and jazz composition at Berklee College of Music…where the next chapter begins…
Musical inspirations are wide ranging – from Bach to Messiaen (a fellow synaesthete), Fats Waller to Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans, from Wayne Shorter to astronomy, Shakti to archeology, Nick Drake, travel and psychology…but most importantly of all, finding time to watch the flowers grow…
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