KEYNOTE PRESENTERS

Erin graduated in harpsichord performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with first-class honours and the University Medal. He completed his Masters in fortepiano performance and a PhD in Musicology with Tom Beghin at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal. He was named the Westfield Concert Scholar (Cornell) on fortepiano for 2009-2010 and from 2003 to 2012 Erin was a central member of the award-winning Ensemble Caprice (Montreal). Helyard is particularly active in reviving in both score and performance neglected seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera.

As Artistic Director and co-founder of the celebrated Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes (Sydney) he has forged new standards of excellence in historically-informed performance in Australia. He has conducted from the keyboard performances of Purcell’s Fairy Queen (Montreal Baroque Festival), Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, Purcell’s Dioclesian, Vivaldi’s Griselda, Cavalli’s Giasone, Salieri’s The Chimney Sweep, Vivaldi’s Bajazet, Grétry’s L’amant jaloux, Handel’s Theodora, Rameau’s Anacréon, Vinci’s Erighetta e Don Chilone and Rameau’s Pigmalion (Pinchgut), Handel’s Acis and Galatea (NZ Opera), Handel’s Orlando (Hobart Baroque), Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Handel’s Faramondo and Agrippina for Brisbane Baroque.

In 2017 he conducted the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra for Handel’s Saul at the Adelaide Festival in a fêted revival of a Glyndebourne production directed by Barrie Kosky; he received the Helpmann Award for Best Music Direction in 2017 for this production. Three operas under his direction won Best Opera at the Helpmann Awards in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Helyard duets in nineteenth-century repertoire on historical pianos with renowned Alkan exponent Stephanie McCallum and on fortepiano and harpsichord he has recently been described as “Australia’s most engaging soloist” by Limelight magazine. Erin also appears as guest conductor and keyboard soloist with the Australian Haydn Ensemble.

In 2017 Helyard was awarded a major Australian Research Council Discovery Grant for a collaborative project with colleagues at the University of Sydney, Oxford University, and the Australian National University (Performing Transdisciplinarity: Image, Music, and Text in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture). He is currently Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and appears by kind courtesy of that institution. His research interests include historical performance practice, eighteenth-century music, seventeenth- to nineteenth-century opera, intersections of music and capitalism, Ancient Greek music, the cultural life of the piano, Bourdieu, music and philosophy, the history of music notation, re-mixes and revisions, and topics related to the body, gender, sexuality, and feminism.

His work is featured in numerous instrumental recordings, church choral, educational piano and Christian artist releases. His arrangements and compositions appear on recent projects by Sandi Patty, Travis Cottrell, Sara Groves and Ronan Tynan. Phillip is co-author, major composer and orchestrator of the internationally acclaimed Hal Leonard Student Piano Library, a complete method for young students. His unique piano arrangements are also featured in The Phillip Keveren Series (Hal Leonard Publishing). Mr. Keveren holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition from California State University, Northridge, and a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Southern California. He and his wife Lisa live in Brentwood, Tennessee and are parents of two children, Lindsay and Sean.

His solo repertoire spans the music of Bach and Scarlatti all the way through to new works written specially for him. As a collaborative pianist, he has performed a vast number of instrumental duos and other chamber works.

A champion of music by Australian composers, David Lockett has made a particular study of the piano music of Margaret Sutherland. This work resulted in an ABC Classics CD followed by a performing edition prepared from the composer’s own manuscripts.

Over more than fifty years, David Lockett has had an almost continuous association with the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, from enrolment as a twelve-year-old Single Study student to his appointment as Professor and Director. He was the first performer to be promoted to the rank of full professor and the first to receive a Doctor of Music degree in the field of performance. Upon his retirement from the full-time staff of the university, he was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor. His other awards have included a Stephen Cole the Elder prize for excellence in teaching, a nomination for CD of the year in the APRA/AMC music awards, an honorary life membership from the Piano Teachers’ National Association of Japan and a Medal of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to music as a concert pianist, educator and researcher, and as an advocate and supporter of Australian music and composers. He is a Patron of the Music Teachers’ Association of South Australia.

David Lockett has had many different roles within the AMEB, including that of Director and member of the Federal Board, and chair of various syllabus committees. In 2014, he compiled and edited the Series 17 set of piano grade books and subsequently became Chief Practical Examiner overseeing Licentiate and Fellowship diploma examinations. In 2017, he was appointed Principal Consultant leading a process of syllabus review and publication development to coincide with the AMEB’s centenary in 2018.

Appearing as a concert pianist in over eighty countries, Joanna has worked with many eminent conductors — Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Sir Simon Rattle, Valery Gergiev and Michael Tilson Thomas amongst them. She has performed with London and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, Chicago, Melbourne and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestras, the Berlin Symphony and Salzburg Camerata, amongst many others. She has premiered many landmark compositions, ranging from Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Django Bates to John Adams and James MacMillan. She performs regularly at major venues throughout the world, including Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre and the Barbican in London, Sydney Opera House, Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Joanna has made over thirty solo recordings, covering Bach, Scarlatti, Ravel, Debussy, jazz, contemporary music and more. Her own record label SoundCircus was founded in 1998 and has released many highly successful recordings of solo and concerto repertoire, including the Mercury Prize-nominated Play, the complete Chopin Mazurkas, Live in Buenos Aires, Bach’s Goldberg Variations (recorded at the Mozarteum in Salzburg), concertos by Britten, Gershwin, Schnittke and Bach and a four-CD Messiaen set.

In Summer 2012 she performed at two BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and made her debut at Lincoln Center‘s ‘Mostly Mozart‘ Festival. Known for her Bach interpretations, she was invited by Sir John Eliot Gardiner to perform the Goldberg Variations at the Royal Albert Hall in April 2013.

Joanna was the subject of a South Bank Show on ITV, and her performances are regularly broadcast on both television and radio world-wide. Her books include PianoWorld for Faber Music.

She was appointed Artistic Director of Dartington International Summer School in 2014. She was Artistic Director of Bath International Music Festival until 2012, and she curated the 2010 multi-arts Deloitte Ignite Festival at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

She has received many Honorary awards, including Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge in June 2016. She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen’s Jubilee Honours in 2012, and was appointed as a Professor of the University of London at the Royal Academy of Music in 2013.

Neal is Professor of Historical Performance within the Historical Performance Division (which he founded and of which he was Chair from 2006-2016) and Program Leader of Postgraduate Research at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His monograph Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) is hailed as a book that ‘no serious pianist should be without’ (Limelight, 2012) and honoured as ‘a notable book’ on Alex Ross’s 2012 Apex List. In 2012, it was the subject of a five-part series broadcast by ABC Classic FM during the Sydney International Piano Competition and an interview with Christopher Lawrence for the ABC Classic FM Music Makers programme. During 2015-16 Neal was a chief editor (with Clive Brown and Kate Bennett Wadsworth for the new Bärenreiter Urtext performing edition of the complete Brahms chamber works for one solo instrument and piano) which has received critical acclaim. Bärenreiter have commissioned Neal (with Clive Brown) to produce editions of the Beethoven and Eberl Sonatas for violin and piano. Neal has recently received prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) funding for a three-year Discovery Project (2017-19) for performance research in 19th-century piano playing.

In 2013 Neal performed at the Sydney Festival in a collaborative project with Australian indie rock band Dappled Cities; the Music Viva Festival 2013 performing Brahms’s Piano Quartet Op. 25 with Ironwood and Beethoven’s Horn Sonata with Hector McDonald; a chamber arrangement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 15 with the Australian Haydn Ensemble during the Beethoven’s Fortepiano season at the Sydney Opera House’s Utzon Room; Mozart’s Piano Quartet K. 478 and Brahms’s Piano Quintet Op. 34 with Ironwood at the Melbourne Recital Centre; and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville; in various Australian Chamber Orchestra seasons including Andreas Scholl Sings Vivaldi and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio; and Pinchgut Opera’s production of Cavalli’sGiasone. He also gave a series of public lectures and workshops based on Off the Record during the Young Pianists Festival in Amsterdam, at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Leeds University and the Brussels Conservatoire.