Biography

Singer Helene Dallaire,a graduate of Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique de Montreal, started her professional life as an actress, alternating musical plays with purely acting work.
While acting at the Opera de Montreal, she had a musical revelation, being surrounded by some of the most beautiful voices in the world, accompanied by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Although humbling, the awakening was so overwhelming that it brought her to acknowledge her yearning to commit herself to music.

That shock motivated her to earn a degree from Faculte de Musique de l'Universite de Montreal where she studied classical singing with eminent professor France Dion. While still at that University, she was entrusted with these beautiful French songs from the Renaissance era, little known, gathered by a French musicologist. She added Greensleeves and God Rest You Merry Gentleman as they are of the same flavor.

Those Christmas songs, most of them modal, called for a singing style more sober than pure classical singing, and that is where Ms Dallaire's years of listening to jazz and blues, her love for Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn, Mahalia Jackson, Veronique Sanson, helped her to create a style that Greg La Traille, of Bayside Distribution described as:"The Lyrical voice of Helene Dallaire. Her voice, at once original, lilting, somewhere between operatic and pop, is incredibly beautiful".

Helene Dallaire, currently living in Northern California, is presently working on another recording of old French folk songs.