Helēna Sorokina

Singer

© Theresa Wey

The Latvian singer Helēna Sorokina lives in Vienna and specializes in contemporary vocal music and concert singing. Since 2017 she is the contralto in the vocal ensemble Cantando Admont under the direction of Cordula Bürgi. Performances in this ensemble have taken her to venues including the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Bremen concert hall Die Glocke and the Vienna Konzerthaus, and to festivals such as the Salzburg Festival, Wien Modern, the steirischer herbst, Vilnius 700, Eclat and Klangspuren Schwaz.

She also performs regularly as a concert singer with the EuropaChorAkademie and various orchestras in Austria and abroad, including the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, the Kurpfälzisches Kammerorchester, the Thüringen Philharmonie Gotha-Eisenach and the Georgian Chamber Orchestra Ingolstadt.

Helēna Sorokina was born in Riga and studied singing and vocal pedagogy at the University of the Arts in Graz. Since 2021 she has been a doctoral student and since 2022 a university assistant on the Artistic and Scientific Doctoral Study Programme of the University of the Arts in Graz. She has given lectures at universities such as UC Berkeley and UC Davis, CalArts in Los Angeles and the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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 the Arts in Graz, in which she explores the various facets, techniques and arts of notation in contemporary singing.

An award-winning part of this project is Shades of Solitude, which features more than sixty unaccompanied new compositions for contralto 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.

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Current as of July 2025