Helen Adie

Helen Craddock Perkin (25 February 1909 – 19 October 1996) was an English pianist and composer, best known today for her association with John Ireland during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Early career Perkin was born in Hackney, London, the youngest of six children. Her mother was a pianist, and from the age of 11 she took lessons from Arthur Alexander. At 16 she entered the Royal College of Music, continuing her lessons with Alexander, and subsequently (through the Octavia Travelling Scholarship), studied orchestration with Anton Webern in Vienna and piano with Eduard Steuermann.

She first took composition lessons from John Ireland in 1927. Sylvia Townsend Warner observed her turn the pages for Ireland at a BBC performance of his Sonatina in April 1928, describing her as "a very beautiful serious child". In 1930 she won the Cobbett Competition with her one movement Phantasy Quartet. That year she was the soloist in Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto at the RCM, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. By then she was broadcasting regularly as a pianist, with a repertoire that soon stretched from Haydn and Schubert through to Ibert, Ravel, Berg and Egon Wellesz.

Meanwhile, Ireland was working on his own piano concerto with Perkin in mind as the soloist.

Break with John Ireland and wartime Fiona Richards suggests that Ireland's relationship with Perkin was "a demanding and possessive one", and she later confessed "the situation became so impossible that a break had to be made". The rift was hastened by her marriage in 1935 to the avant garde architect George Mountford Adie (1901–1989), after which the two ceased to communicate for many years. A Piano Trio followed in 1931, performed at the Societe National in Paris. Her Episode for piano was performed at the Winter Proms on 2 January 1936, with Perkin as soloist. In 1937 a concert of her chamber music was broadcast by the BBC, including the Piano Trio, the Four Preludes for piano (1933) and Spring Rhapsody for violin and piano, with soloist Antonio Brosa. Her Piano Sonata also received its premiere at Queen's Hall in October 1937. There were further large scale piano works after the war, including Eleven Impressions (1947). The three movement suite for piano Village Fair (1934) is an example of her lighter music. She also composed for film and television (such as The Inward Eye, 1955) and two children's ballets for television, Calamity at Court (1955) and The Wonder Bird (1961), both with choreographer Nesta Brooking (1906–2006). As with John Ireland, Perkin turned to composing for brass band in her later years with three suites that were used as test pieces: Carnival, (1957), Cordell Suite (1959), and Island Heritage (1962). They established the Gurdjieff Society of Newport. Recordings of her playing music for Gurdjieff by Thomas de Hartmann were issued on CD under the name Helen Adie. But she was also a Movements teacher and composed music for the Movements as well. Some of this music has been published and privately circulated.

George and Helen Adie were depicted as the fictional characters Mr and Mrs Todd Ashby in Carl Ginsburg's Medicine Journeys: Ten Stories (Center Press, 1983), specifically the story 'The Daphne Blossom'.