Performing and teaching artist based in New York City.
About
With spirit and sensitivity, soprano Chelsea Helm brings a versatile voice to the concert stage.
An active choral artist, Ms. Helm appears regularly with Seraphic Fire, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, True Concord Voices & Orchestra, Vocal Arts Ensemble Cincinnati, and Conspirare, with whom she was nominated for 2020 and 2022 GRAMMY® awards for Best Choral Album. You can also hear her with Kinnara, the Carmel Bach Festival, the American Soloists Ensemble, and Voices of Ascension. This season she makes debuts with the Concordia Chamber Players, The Thirteen, and Spire Chamber Ensemble.
As an oratorio soloist, she recently made her international concert debut performing Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony at the Seoul Arts Center in South Korea. Her latest concert and oratorio appearances around the United States include the Brahms Requiem, Haydn’s Theresienmesse and Paukenmesse, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and the Verdi Requiem in a new chamber arrangement. She looks forward to her first Haydn Creation this season.
Ms. Helm has also been featured in concert with the South Korean Klim Orchestra, the National Chorus of Korea, the Grand Rapids Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, Muskegon Symphony Orchestra, Brevard Festival Orchestra, the Rice University Orchestra, and at the University of Wisconsin La-Crosse and Missouri State University.
Last season she presented art song recitals in New Mexico, Virginia, and Utah, featuring works by Samuel Barber, Andre Previn, Maurice Ravel, Leonard Bernstein, Craig Johnson, Gabriel Kahane, and Andrew Maxfield.
With a special affinity for new music and contemporary premieres, Ms. Helm has created numerous roles in chamber works for live theatrical and digital mediums. She was featured in Houston Grand Opera’s NOW, Episode 2 from their Star-Cross’d series of short-form operas, premiered on YouTube, and written by Avner Dorman with libretto by John Grimmett. She also created the title role in Lolly Willowes, a contemporary chamber musical that premiered at MATCH Houston in 2019, composed by Michael Alec Rose and based on the novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Ms. Helm holds a Master of Music in Voice Performance from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and a Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance and Music Education from Western Michigan University. Also a WMU Gold Company alumna, Ms. Helm recorded a Downbeat award-winning album in 2013 with vocal jazz quartet the Four Corners.
A Michigan native, she is now based in New York City.