Helen Charlston and Sholto Kynoch
Saturday 30 January 2027, 7.30pm
Programme
To be confirmed
About
Helen Charlston
Hailed “a rather special mezzo” (Music Web International), Helen is a young artist increasingly in demand in the UK and abroad.
Winner of the 2023 BBC Music Magazine Vocal Awards, she won first prize in the 2018 London Handel Singing Competition and was a finalist in the 2019 Grange Festival International Singing Competition, won the Ferrier Loveday Song Prize in the 2021 Kathleen Ferrier Awards and is a BBC New Generation Artist. Helen was a founder participant of the Rising Star of the Enlightenment programme, working alongside the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; a member of Les Arts Florissants Young Artist Programme (Jardin des Voix) for 2021/22; and is a 2018 City Music Foundation Artist.
This coming season Helen makes her debut in San Francisco with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra singing Irene in Handel Theodora; joins Dunedin Consort for the first time as well as making her debuts with Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, RIAS Kammerchor and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Helen returns to join Les Arts Florissants singing the title role in Purcell Dido and Aeneas at The Royal Opera of Versailles and will perform the role of the Sorceress in the same opera for Grange Festival Opera.
She is regularly heard on the concert platform with some of the UK’s most prominent collaborative pianists. In recent years she has performed at Oxford Lieder Festival, Leeds Lieder and the Ryedale Festival, as well as giving recitals at Wigmore Hall and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
The hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic saw Helen’s music making return closer to home. Her Isolation Songbook, a collection of songs by 15 different composers, was commissioned during the first UK lockdown and released on CD (Delphian Records) in early 2021.
2022 saw the release of her second solo album on the Delphian label: Battle Cry. Inspired by the music of Strozzi, Purcell and Monteverdi the recording is centred on a new song cycle for her and lutenist Toby Carr, by Owain Park and seeks to re-balance an obsession with female lament and abandonment in 17th century. They will tour the programme over the coming year.
Helen began singing as chorister and head chorister of the St Albans Abbey Girls Choir. She then studied music at Trinity College, Cambridge where she held a choral scholarship for four years and was a scholar on the Pembroke College Lieder Scheme, led by Joseph Middleton.
Sholto Kynoch
Sholto Kynoch is a sought-after pianist who specialises in song and chamber music. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the Oxford International Song Festival (formerly Oxford Lieder), which won a prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2015, cited for its ‘breadth, depth and audacity’ of programming. In July 2018, Sholto was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in the RAM Honours.
Working with many of today’s leading singers, recent recitals have taken him to Wigmore Hall, Heidelberger Frühling, Beethovenfest Bonn, the Zeist International Lied Festival in the Netherlands, the LIFE Victoria festival and Palau de la Música in Barcelona, the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, the Opéra de Lille, Opernhaus Zürich, Maison Symphonique de Montréal, Queensland Art Song Festival in Australia, and many other leading venues and festivals nationally and internationally.
His extensive discography includes the first complete edition of the songs of Hugo Wolf, recorded live at the Oxford International Song Festival, the final volume of which was released in January 2023. He has also recorded the complete songs of John Ireland and Havergal Brian, as well as recital discs of Schubert and Schumann songs.