Helēna Sorokina

The Latvian alto Helēna Sorokina lives in Vienna and specializes in contemporary vocal music and concert singing. She has performed at major venues including the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Lincoln Center in New York, and at international festivals such as the Salzburg Festival, Wien Modern, the steirischer herbst, Vilnius 700, Eclat and Klangspuren Schwaz.

Since 2017 she has been a member of the vocal ensemble Cantando Admont under the direction of Cordula Bürgi. She has also performed with various orchestras in Austria and abroad, including the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, the Kurpfälzisches Kammerorchester, the Thüringen Philharmonie Gotha-Eisenach, Ornamentum Wien and the Georgian Chamber Orchestra Ingolstadt. She has participated in numerous world premieres by composers such as Beat Furrer, Dmitri Kourliandski, Klaus Lang, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Feliz Anne Reyes Macahis and Francesca Verunelli.

Since 2020 Helēna Sorokina has been developing and presenting the project VOICE.ONLY, an innovative contemporary concert series and a research project with the same name based at the Centre for Artistic Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. In this project she explores the various facets, techniques and arts of notation in contemporary singing. In close collaboration with composers, she has developed an intuitively understandable, unified notation for complex timbres and extended vocal techniques. An award-winning component of this project is Shades of Solitude, which features more than ninety unaccompanied new solo compositions for contralto  written for her and that she has premiered. For this project she was named ‘Surprise of the Year’ 2022 by the Latvian classical broadcaster Radio 3 Klasika, and was nominated for the 2022 Latvian Public Media Award in Culture.

Helēna Sorokina was born in Riga and studied singing and vocal pedagogy at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, where she is currently a doctoral student on the Artistic and Scientific Doctoral Study Programme. She has given lectures and workshops at universities such as the Zurich University of the Arts, the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and CalArts in Los Angeles.