HéloïseWerner

/
  • Soprano
  • Composer
Headshot of Héloïse Werner
Headshot of Héloïse Werner

About Héloïse

French-born soprano and composer Héloïse Werner is currently an Associate Artist at Wigmore Hall and is ‘quickly becoming a latter-day Cathy Berberian or Meredith Monk’ (Richard Morrison, The Times). Her debut album 'Phrases' was released in 2022 on Delphian Records, and quickly garnered widespread critical acclaim, including Sunday Times' 10 Best Classical Records of 2022, Gramophone magazine's Editor’s Choice (“extraordinary range, tone and vocal abilities… composer of subtle imagination”), Presto Classical's Editor’s Choice (“absolute tour de force”), BBC Music Magazine's Choral/Song Choice (*****), The Times' Classical album of the week (****). Apple Music described the disc as “a staggering debut from an imaginative and original voice”. Héloïse's anticipated follow-up 'close-ups' was released in June 2024, and launched at the Southbank Centre. The Observer noted that “this is a record full of poise, curiosity and playfulness (…) Werner and her colleagues make music that is as singular as it is striking” (****)

As a composer, Werner has written for the CBSO, Aurora Orchestra, Maitrise de Radio France, London Handel Festival, Lawrence Power, Mishka Rushdie-Momen and Helen Charlston and has commissions in the pipeline for Manchester Collective, St Paul’s Cathedral, BBC Singers, and Royal Northern Sinfonia, amongst others. As a soprano, Héloïse has performed with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Grange Festival, CBSO and Nash Ensemble, and created the role of Madame DuVal in Sarah Angliss’ opera Giant opening the Aldeburgh Festival 2023. Of her solo opera The Other Side of the Sea, The Times said "you can't help but be dazzled by it..."

Héloïse is a fluent improviser and musical leader, working with the contemporary quartet The Hermes Experiment, the winners of the Young Artist Award at the RPS awards in 2021.

Héloïse is based in London

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Contact

Megan Steller

Megan Steller

Associate Artist Manager
Ivo Ivanov

Ivo Ivanov

Assistant Artist Manager

Representation

Worldwide general management with Askonas Holt

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Season Highlights

Nov 2024
Southbank Centre, London
Lawrence Power’s Lock-in
Nov 2024
St Paul's Cathedral, London
Premiere of Werner's new anthem for the combined choirs of Westminster Cathedral, St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey (cond. Andrew Carwood MBE)
Nov 2024
Wigmore Hall, London
The Hermes Experiment & Abel Selaocoe
Jan 2025
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Premiere of Werner's siren suite with the CBSO (cond. Volkov)
Feb 2025
Various, United Kingdom
Hidden Mechanisms Tour with Manchester Collective
Apr 2025
Wigmore Hall, London
Héloïse Werner presents her second performance as Wigmore Hall Associate Artist alongside Max Baillie (violin, viola), Colin Alexander (cello), Kit Downes (piano, chamber organ), Jas Kayser (drums, percussion)
May 2025
The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Gateshead
Premiere of Werner's The Cuckoo’s Hour with the Royal Northern Sinfonia
Jun 2025
Various, Scotland
Concerts for a Summer’s Night tour with Scottish Ensemble

Video

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Selected Repertoire

Héloïse Werner

REJOICE! (2023) for choir & orchestra, commissioned by the London Handel Festival and premiered by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain & the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Sofi Jeannin at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, 6 April 2024

Héloïse Werner

for mira (2022) for orchestra, commissioned by the Aurora Orchestra and premiered by the Aurora Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Collon at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, 25 March 2023

Héloïse Werner

crossings (2022) for soprano & orchestra, commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and premiered by CBSO & Héloïse, conducted by Clark Rundell at Birmingham Symphony Hall, 29 January 2023

Héloïse Werner

Unspecified Intentions (2022) for voice & string orchestra, arranged by Héloïse and Colin Alexander and premiered by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & Héloïse in May 2022 for BBC Radio 3’s ‘This Classical Life Live’

News

Press

  • Hidden Mechanisms: Manchester Collective

    Royal Northern College of Music
    Feb 2025

    • When a piece of music is heard for the first time ever, there’s always the delicious hope that, just by being there, an audience might witness something special, to be remembered fondly. It doesn’t happen always, but I think it did for Héloïse Werner’s Hidden Mechanisms, which received its first performance in Manchester last night.

    • Werner is one of the few contemporary young composers who has a recognisable compositional fingerprint coupled with an imagination that is as unique as it is vast... with Werner, we hear the music and wonder what on earth goes on inside her head. It is in a sense humbling to be exposed to such brazen audacity of youth. From the quixotic to the quietly sparkling, Werner’s piece is stunning, and spectacularly intricate

  • World Premiere of siren suite: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

    Symphony Hall, Birmingham
    Jan 2025

    • No stranger to aural adventure – as well as singing, she uses every possible muscle in her face to produce unusual sounds – Werner takes surrealism to new heights. Her deftly original Siren Suite, for soprano and orchestra, imagines five contrasting figures who control and manipulate the sea, characterised by a lightly scored, fluid orchestra.

    • Werner has a keen harmonic sense, with echoes of early Stravinsky, and such a winning stage personality... Werner has... poetry in her soul.

  • The Hermes Experiment; Abel Selaocoe cello

    Wigmore Hall, London
    Nov 2024

    • As the harp, clarinet and double bass sinuously evoked the shifting textures of the natural landscape through flutters, echoes and rattles, the French-born soprano and composer Heloïse Werner demonstrated once more the anarchic versatility of her extraordinary voice. At some points the notes took on a metallic edge before morphing into animal cries, at others she shocked us with guttural weeping.

  • Lawrence Power’s Lock-In

    Southbank Centre, London
    Nov 2024

    • ...while Héloise Werner’s Mixed Phrases takes lines from a poem by Rimbaud, which a soprano (Werner herself) atomises into syllables and isolated phonemes as the viola urges her on, creating a witty to-and-fro.

  • close-ups: Sophomore Album

    Delphian Records
    Jun 2024

    • This is a record full of poise, curiosity and playfulness, the result of close listening and risk by all involved. Werner and her colleagues make music that is as singular as it is striking.

    • This disc captivates listeners with its improvisational and dramatic concept, blurring traditional sounds while showcasing Werner's technical brilliance, often creating a luminous effect.

    • A hotly-awaited second album from soprano-composer Héloïse Werner weaves together a dizzying tapestry of conceptual threads - from a melancholy, fatalistic song by Barbara Strozzi, via a scathing survey of male attitudes to quote-unquote 'hysteria' from the fifth century BC up until the early 2020s, to the macaronic close-ups by Werner herself (to words by her sister), it is an exhilarating and unique journey of discovery.

    • Héloïse Werner is a unique voice in contemporary music performance, literally as a soprano with the same astonishing acrobatic versatility as, say, the late Jane Manning, and also as a composer whose music evokes a uniquely translucent freedom of expression. She’s been a key member of the experimental ensemble The Hermes Experiment, but teams up here with a miscellany of similarly minded instrumentalists for a refreshingly personal musical journey chiefly of her own music, interspersed with the fragile simplicity of Errollyn Wallen’s Tree and sublime arrangements of songs from earlier centuries by Barbara Strozzi, Julie Pinel and the iconic Hildegard of Bingen. Her own close-ups is the centrepiece, encompassing spectral enchantment and fiery absurdity. Unexpected Intentions is as madcap as any Maxwell Davies music theatre piece, Les Leçons du mardi a hysterical musical menagerie. Three improvisations (Echoes) act as transitional meditations. Lullaby for a Sister makes a deeply moving conclusion.

    • Performing her own work - there is surely no better interpreter - alongside a killer ensemble... Werner and her collaborators are co-composers for an interlude that reappears in three guises throughout the album. Scratchy spectralism develops into a guttural outpouring; varied, unidentifiable voices create an unsettled soundscape.

      • Claire Jackson, BBC Music Magazine

    • Warner and her colleagues have once again successfully pushed the envelope in a memorable set of offerings. Warmly recommended.

  • close-ups: Album Launch

    Southbank Centre, London
    Jun 2024

    • ★★★★★ A soprano unlike any other lets loose: Classical’s ‘queen of weird’ lived up to the hype in the Purcell Room at Southbank Centre. Héloïse Werner — soprano-composer-cellist-arranger — has risen from contemporary classical’s golden child to being crowned, in these pages, “classical’s new queen of weird”.

  • Phrases: Debut Solo Album

    Delphian Records
    Jun 2022

    • Werner, 31, is a dazzling bilingual vocalist, a multi-instrumentalist, and a composer whose ingenious music — and performances (…) — lets words and music meet, meld and play edgy games together. (…) her sense of fun gives even the most daring pieces a light and engaging touch.

    • Héloïse Werner and friends create a vivid soundworld (…) Werner’s voice flits between natural directness and operatic expressions, endlessly flexible, theatrical or intimate (…) brilliantly done.

    • lt is hard not to be in awe of Héloïse Werner: a soprano of extraordinary range, tone and vocal abilities, possessing a seemingly inexhaustible expressive range (…) Werner is a composer of subtle imagination (…) Delphian’s sound is first-rate, catching the full dynamic range and every nuance of Werner’s voice.

    • It will make you rethink the possibilities of writing or voice – virtuosic, tender, surprising, there’s an almost unschooled immediacy of expression at times that cuts to the heart … [a] solo vocal debut like no other.

      • Andrew McGregor, BBC Radio 3’s Record Review
      • 01 August 2022

    • ...absolute tour de force (…) there’s real heart and soul alongside the avant-garde pyrotechnics throughout this recital of new works...

    • Héloïse Werner’s debut album was one of the most original and creative this year in terms of programming, but it also managed to impress with the sheer virtuosity of the performance. Using the human voice as an instrument, Werner looks at human language from many angles, in contemporary works by 8 composers (including herself).

    • ...a staggering debut from an imaginative and original new voice (…) she achieves miracles...

      • The editors, Apple Music
      • 07 June 2024

    • Phrases’ bolsters Héloïse Werner’s reputation as one of the most gifted and versatile vocal artists of her generation (…) this is one of the most stunning debut albums we’ve heard in a very long time, a magnificent achievement by Héloïse Werner and her musical collaborators.

    • Phrases displays her versatility as a singer and composer, but as musical catalyst too (…) distinctive album (…) Werner is joined by her first-rate regular collaborators.

  • World Premiere of Knight's Dream: Oxford International Song Festival

    Holywell Music Room, Oxford
    Nov 2023

    • There are also plenty of sparky young composers bold enough to risk comparison with Schubert, Schumann and all those other 19th-century giants by making a distinctly 21st-century contribution to the lieder repertoire. In fact, Héloïse Werner’s Knight’s Dream was doubly audacious — first by daring to set Heinrich Heine in a programme entirely consisting of Heine settings by distinguished composers (Schumann’s Dichterliebe followed straight after the premiere), and second by incorporating new expressive means into the time-honoured voice-and-piano format of the lieder form. (…) All of which perfectly captured the irony, as well as the spookiness, of Heine’s text.

    • The Werner premiere was captivating. Heine’s words tell of an old, stumbling knight who dreams of dancing every night with his beloved and of his empty despair when he wakes. Werner’s accompaniment tingled in the dark of the knight’s gloomy lodgings, Kynoch creeping through the delicate filigree of the spare accompaniment, feeling his way along the score, sometimes rapping on the piano case to conjure the knock on the door that would herald the knight’s lover. Charlston sang Werner’s haunting, lyrical vocal line exquisitely, alert to every nuance of the text, including spoken interjections in English, amusingly turning on its head the line “Yet never a word would be spoken".

  • World Premiere of crossings: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

    Symphony Hall, Birmingham
    Jan 2023

    • But the two most memorable pieces of all were very strikingly different (…) Héloïse Werner’s enchanting Crossings, one of four pieces in the concert that involved a singer, in this case Werner herself, whose wordless phrases were echoed and transformed by the orchestra and vice versa, in ways that were both utterly logical and regularly surprising.

    • Like Confessional, crossings is written in the soprano-composer’s distinctive language, splattered with colourful timbres (…) Werner chases and catches the phrase into her signature Lear-like expressivo.

  • World Premiere of Les Leçons du Mardi: Tippett String Quartet

    Wigmore Hall, London
    Mar 2023

    • If the source material might (stereotypically) suggest music of overblown emotion, then (unsurprisingly) Werner is far more imaginative and subversive. This isn’t a piece about so-called female hysteria, rather how men have for centuries controlled the narrative about women’s bodies and minds. Werner takes the power back — as performer and composer. Her libretto (by Dr Emma Werner, her scientist sister) is a patchwork of infuriating quotes spanning the centuries about women being crazy. Yes, this music should come with a blood-pressure warning. The way in which Werner sets them is smart, effective and provocative.

  • World Premiere of for mira: Aurora Orchestra

    Southbank Centre, London
    Mar 2023

    • Héloïse Werner’s For Mira (…) is a direct, touching act of remembrance.

    • Héloise Werner’s for mira, a delicate, sensuous tribute to the late Mira Calix (…) Meditative, generous (…) It spoke to, for and about us all.

  • In the Realm of Sorrow: London Handel Festival

    Stone Nest, London
    Feb 2023

    • Werner’s musical “dissolves” at the start and end of each cantata were breathtaking: unfamiliar harmonies spooled out of a Handelian cadence; the double bass became a percussion instrument amid guttural squawks from the oboes.

    • The cantatas were linked and tinkered with (though only slightly) by apt interpolations by composer Héloïse Werner...

    • ....musical passages by Héloïse Werner, introducing a whispering atonality that subtly heightened the sense of subversion and tortured emotion...

    • ...and at one point a full-scale sonic blitzkrieg – all devised by the ubiquitous composer Héloïse Werner...

    • Werner’s fade ins-outs, that framed and linked the cantatas, were sonic sleights-of-ear, morphing out of Handel’s motifs into strange harmonies and percussive echoes (…) disconcerting and thrilling in equal measure.

  • The Other Side of the Sea (Solo Opera)

    King's Place, London
    Apr 2019

    • ...you can’t help but be dazzled by it (…) quickly becoming a latter-day Cathy Berberian or Meredith Monk (…) virtuoso entertainment like this is welcome any time...

  • Héloïse Werner, Kit Downes & Colin Alexander in Recital

    St John’s Smith Square, London
    Jul 2021

    • Héloïse Werner should be a name on the lips of any musical adventurer. (…) This young soprano-composer – and cellist too – is a one-off, who can transform a tiny fragment of song into a mesmerising drama. It’s as if her whole being is double-jointed. Her beautiful voice can flip itself from long-lined lyricism into a battery of percussive instruments: trilling her tongue at jet-propeller speed, turning a simple vowel sound into a complex expression of love or anguish, with a lexicon of facial expressions to match.

  • World Premiere of Incantation in Four Parts: Quatuor Elmire

    La Scala, Paris
    Oct 2023

    • On mesure la parfaite entente des musiciens dans l’incarnation de cette musique singulière. The musicians are in perfect harmony as they embody this singular music.

Discography