Biography

Sought after as a pianist, chamber musician, song accompanist, Helene gives concerts and teaches in Berlin, New York, and in France. 

Born in Paris to an American mother and French father she grew up in a musical environment and entered the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris at age 12 to study with Germaine Mounier. A few years later, she was awarded First Prize in Piano as well as in Chamber Music, and started concertizing. She obtained the Bourse Lavoisier (full scholarship) to continue her studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, under the guidance of Gyorgy Sebok, and later with Menahem Pressler, for whom she became Professor Assistant at IU. She also holds a Professional degree from the Juilliard School with Jerome Lowenthal. Throughout her career, she has worked with several artists, including Gaby Casadesus, Yevgeni Malinin, Nikita Magaloff, and Isaac Stern. 

Helene is a laureate of awards (Grand Prix Charles Oulmont from the Fondation de France), and won top prizes in competitions: the Concours International d’Epinal, the Robert Casadesus International Competition, the Chopin National Competition, the Thomas Richner Piano Competition, East West Artists Awards, and the Concert Artist Guild in New York.

In France, she has performed at the Chopin Festival, the Paris Summer Festival, the International Festival of Radio France in Montpellier, the International Festival of Young Soloists in Bordeaux, the Beauvais International Cello Festival, and concerts in Paris in Salle Gaveau, the Opera Comique, and at the UNESCO. 

She has been soloist with l’Orchestre du Conservatoire de Paris, the Cleveland Orchestra (at the Casadesus Competition), the Indianapolis Symphony, and the New England Symphonic Ensemble.

In New York, she is part of the HD Piano Duo with her friend David Oei, the Elysium Chamber Ensemble, and appears frequently with the New York Philharmonic Chamber Ensembles at Merkin Hall. Over the years, she has collaborated with partners such as: cellists Hai Ye Ni and Philippe Muller, violinists Glen Dicterow and Yuval Yaron, violist Karen Dreyfus, clarinetists Emma Johnson, Stanley Drucker, Charles Neidrich, and flutist Nicolas Duchamp with whom she played in Japan, Vietnam, and China.

Throughout her career, she was invited to play at the Wallace Collection in London, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Philips Collection Museum as well as at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. In New York, she has performed at the Metropolitan Museum, the Alliance Française, The United Nations, Rockefeller University, Bargemusic, Weill Recital Hall, and at the Isaac Stern Auditorium in Carnegie Hall. 

Teaching has always been an important part of Helene’s life. She has presented lectures and masterclasses at the Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, at the School of Music at the University of North Carolina, at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. For 15 years, she was part of the piano faculty at Hoff Barthelson School of Music in Scarsdale (New York) and had a private piano studio in Manhattan where she lived until 2020.

In 2021, she relocated to Berlin where she recently joined the faculty of the Franzosiche Deutsche School of Music and does collaborative piano with many chamber ensembles as well as singers. In the summer of 2023, she was asked to join the faculty of the Berlin Opera Academy as a vocal coach. 

In her free time, Helene is an avid runner and has participated in many marathons in New York and in Berlin. She is an animal lover and a proud sponsor of the Drakenstein Lion Sanctuary in Cape Town.