Tine Thing Helseth

Tine Thing Helseth, pronounced TEE-ne Ting HEL-set, commands international attention both in concerto appearances and as founder-director of two compact ensembles she assembled herself. Her programs extend past the core classical trumpet literature and brass-group repertory into pieces by living composers, while also embracing jazz and tango.

Oslo is the city where Helseth entered the world on August 18, 1987. She began trumpet studies at age seven and promptly entered her school band. As a teenager she counted the Spice Girls among her favorite acts. Every stage of her musical schooling took place inside Norway. In 2002 she enrolled at Oslo’s Barratt Due Institute of Music, remaining until 2009, after which she spent three years at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Her principal mentors were Heidi Johannessen of the Norwegian National Opera Orchestra and Arnulf Naur Nilsen of the Oslo Philharmonic.

A string of prizes had already accumulated by the time she turned twenty, among them the Newcomer of the Year award at the Norwegian Grammy Awards—the first occasion on which a classical musician received either a nomination or the prize itself. Her 2007 schedule included an appearance at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert and the release of her debut album on Simax, a collection of trumpet concertos by Haydn, Albinoni, Hummel, and Johann Baptist Georg Neruda. That same year marked the start of her Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship, which soon opened doors to major engagements.

Ensembles she has joined include the Vienna Symphony, the Liverpool Philharmonic, and the Shanghai Symphony, together with several leading Norwegian orchestras. Recital engagements have brought her repeatedly to the United States, where her itinerary has featured the National Gallery of Art, Carnegie Hall, and Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth; in 2019 she and her all-female brass ensemble tenThing completed an American tour. Helseth also heads TTHQ, the Tine Thing Helseth Quintet, which concentrates on jazz and tango repertoire. Several solo discs appeared on EMI Classics in the early 2010s, after which her recordings moved to Grappa Musikkforlag, Dacapo, and Lawo Classics—the last of these issuing Magical Memories for Trumpet and Organ in 2021. She returned to Lawo Classics in 2023 with the recital Seraph, and in 2024 she and the tenThing Brass Ensemble released She Composes Like a Man, devoted to works by female composers.