Sara Macliver (soprano) and Erin Helyard (piano)

Erin Helyard and Sara Macliver are internationally leading exponents of early music and baroque opera. They shape the music like you are hearing it being created fresh on the spot for the first time.

Sara Macliver is one of Australia’s most popular and versatile artists, and is regarded as one of the leading exponents of Baroque repertoire. Sara is a regular performer with all the Australian symphony orchestras as well as the Perth, Melbourne and Sydney Festivals, Pinchgut Opera, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Musica Viva, and a number of international companies. Sara records for ABC Classics with more than 35 CDs and many awards to her credit. In recent years Sara has sung with Sydney Symphony Orchestra, West Australian Opera, West Australian, Tasmanian, Queensland and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, the Australian String Quartet, St George’s Cathedral, the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra and in several programs with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; she also sang with Sydney Philharmonia, Ten Days on the Island, the Peninsula Summer Festival, Brisbane Camerata, ANAM, Bangalow Festival, St George’s Cathedral and Collegium Musicum amongst many other projects. Sara has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Australia in recognition of her services to singing, and teaches at the Conservatorium there.  

Erin Helyard has been acclaimed as an inspiring conductor and a virtuosic and expressive performer of the harpsichord and fortepiano. 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. His monograph Clementi and the woman at the piano: virtuosity and the market for music in eighteenth-century London was published by Oxford University Studies in Enlightenment in 2022.

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 operatic performance in Australia. Operas under his direction have been awarded Best Opera at the Helpmann Awards for three consecutive years (2015-2017) and he has received two Helpmann Awards for Best Musical Direction: one for a fêted revival of Saul (Adelaide Festival) in 2017 and the other for Hasse’s Artaserse (Pinchgut Opera) in 2019. Together with Richard Tognetti, Erin won an ARIA and an AIR award for Best Classical Album in 2020. In 2023 he was named Limelight’s Critics’ Choice Australian Artist of the Year. Erin is an Associate Professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and appears courtesy of Pinchgut Opera.