Helen joins RIAS Kammerchor and Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin on tour to South Korea, in a performance of Bach Magnificat & Handel’s Dixit Dominus at Seoul Arts Centre conducted by Justin Doyle.

Seoul Arts Centre, 23rd November 2024

Tickets from Seoul Arts Centre

 St Albans Choral Society return to the Abbey with a concert featuring spiritually uplifting French masterpieces by Duruflé and Poulenc alongside Bach’s exciting and energetic Baroque masterpiece, composed in 1723 for the people of Leipzig.

J S Bach Magnificat in D, BWV243

Poulenc Organ Concerto

Duruflé Requiem, Op 9

 Elinor Rolfe Johnson soprano ꞏ Helen Charlston mezzo-soprano ꞏ Bradley Smith tenor ꞏ Alexander Ashworth bass-baritone

Tom Winpenny organ ꞏ St Albans Choral Society ꞏ Orchestra Nova ꞏ George Vass conductor

16th November, 2024 at 7:30pm

St Albans Cathedral, St Albans, AL1 1BY

Tickets from St Albans Choral Society

Seeking a strong man to deliver the tribe from an existential threat, the Israelites choose the outcast son of a harlot, Jephtha, to lead them into battle against the Ammonites. Having made a vow to God that if he is victorious he will offer in sacrifice the first thing he sees on returning home, rejoicing is turned to tragedy when it is his daughter who greets him. Jephtha faces the ultimate dilemma – the choice between faith and love, in Handel’s final dramatic oratorio.

Academy Choir & Baroque Players

Matthew Best, Conductor

Benjamin Hulett, Jephtha

Helen Charlston, Storge

Rowan Pierce, Iphis

James Hall, Hamor

November 9th 2024, 8pm

Sacred Heart Church, Edge Hill, Wimbledon SW19 4LU

Tickets from Wimbledon International Festival

Joined by Sholto Kynoch on piano, Helen makes her first appearance in Flamstead as part of the new Music at St Leonard’s Series. They perform their new song recital programme: ‘Notes of Old’ which celebrates the many different genres of Helen’s music making, drawing lines of connection across the centuries from Monteverdi and Charpentier, to Schubert and Schumann, and new songs by Anna Semple.

St Leonards Flamstead, Flamstead, AL3 8BS

Fri 8th November 2024, 7.30PM

Tickets from Music at St Leonard’s

Helen Charlston, winner of the 2023 BBC Music Magazine Vocal Award, gave a memorable performance at last year’s Festival, described as ‘sensational’ and awarded five stars by The Observer. For the first part of this recital, she and pianist Sholto Kynoch weave together music from across the centuries, juxtaposing works from the Baroque with Romantic and contemporary songs. Music by Bach, Monteverdi and Sweelinck resonates in unexpected ways with songs by Schubert, Hahn, Anna Semple and others, highlighting the enduring tapestry of human experience that transcends temporal boundaries! The pair then perform Schumann’s Kerner Lieder, an extraordinary cycle of songs that also owes much to music of the past.

Holywell Music Room, 7.30pm

Friday 25th October 2024

Tickets from Oxford International Song Festival

Helen joins Prague Philharmonia in their series at the Lobkowicz Palace for an evening celebrating Georg Friederic Handel and Joseph Haydn — two important continental composers of the 18th century, who also had a significant influence on musical life in England. While Haydn spent only a few years in London, Handel remained there for two-thirds of his life and was instrumental in promoting Italian opera and the creation of English oratorio.

Georg Friedrich Händel

Rinaldo, Overture from the Opera

‘Dove Sei‘ (Rinaldo, HWV 7)

Imeneo, Overture from the Opera

‘Sorge nell’alma mia‘ (Imeneo, HWV 41)

Ariodante, Overture from the Opera

'Scherza infida' (Ariodante, HWV 33)

Joseph Haydn

Arianna a Naxos, Hob. XXVIb:2

Tuesday 22nd October 2024, 7pm

Lobkowicz Palace, Prague

Tickets from Prague Philharmonia

Helen Charlston mezzo-soprano, Magdalena Loth-Hill, Gabriella Jones violins, Elitsa Bogdanova viola, Jonathan Byers cello, Jonatan Bougt theorbo, Satoko Doi-Luck harpsichord

George Friderich Handel: Arias from Giulio Cesare and other operas

Henry Purcell: The cares of lovers, I love and I must

Claudio Monteverdi: Si dolce tormento

Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Quel prix de mon amour (Médée)

Three hundred years ago this year Handel's Giulio Cesare had its premiere at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket. This programme showcases arias from that work and from other Handel operas and oratorios spanning the whole of his career, from the 1711 Rinaldo to Jephtha, written in 1750, just a few years before his death.

The arias Helen will be singing, including works by three earlier composers, focus on love in its many forms. Full of emotion, they run the whole gamut - from love’s initial hope and sweetness, through the joy of overcoming a rival, the price of submitting to love, and finally its blissful restoration.

Fri 4 Oct 2024 8.00pm

Little Missenden Church

Tickets from Little Missenden Festival

Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius was already a beloved classic by 1900 when Elgar transformed it into his greatest choral masterpiece, and arguably the finest oratorio by any English composer. Scored for double choir and semi-chorus, soloists, orchestra, and organ, Elgar's composition emanates profound emotion and embodies his faith.

Three choirs will come together accompanied by Orpheus Sinfonia to showcase the talents of acclaimed tenor Ed Lyon as Gerontius, guided on his journey by Helen Charlston’s Angel, alongside Gareth Brynmor John as the priest, and under the baton of Sean Bui.

Quire Voices
Spelthorne Choral Society
West Sussex Philharmonic Choir
Orpheus Sinfonia

Helen Charlston            Mezzo-Soprano
Ed Lyon                           Tenor
Gareth Brynmor John  Baritone
Luke Bond                      Organ
Sean Bui                         Conductor

St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle

7.30PM Saturday, 28th September 2024

Helen performs at Guiting Festival with Fretwork Consort of Viols, in a programme celebrating the old and new. Instrumental and vocal music by Henry Purcell is showcased alongside pieces by contemporary composer Michael Nyman, who has a long standing relationship with the consort. One of Nyman’s greatest influences, Purcell’s glorious ‘Music for a While’ provides the basis for Fretwork’s latest commissioned work by Nyman, ‘Music After a While’ written as part of Nyman’s 75th birthday celebrations in 2019.

Tickets from Guiting Festival

Thursday 25th July, 6.30pm

For the opening concert of their 2024 residency, the Consone Quartet is joined by recent BBC New Generation Artist Helen Charlston in a family-inspired concert.

Clara and Robert Schumann (wife and husband) were close friends with Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn (sister and brother), and often attended the ‘big soirées’ Fanny hosted in Berlin. Robert’s joyous Quartet in F, one of three dedicated to Felix, was written during his famous ‘Year of Chamber Music’ (1842), while ‘Frauenliebe und -leben’ and all other songs in this concert are performed in new arrangements for voice and string quartet by Bill Thorp.

Tickets available from Music at Paxton

Saturday 20th July, Picture Gallery, Paxton House, 7.30pm

Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston, baritone Julien Van Mellaerts and pianist Dylan Perez explore the human relationship with the sea in songs and duets by Charles Stanford, Rebecca Clarke, Carl Loewe, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Paolo Tosti, and Haydn’s dramatic scena Arianna a Naxos. The programme includes the world premiere of Oded Zehavi’s Songs of the Sea, a sequence of songs commissioned by Julien Van Mellaerts, with lyrics by the New Zealand poet Bill Manhire, the British poet Laura Attridge, and the French poet Claire Simon.

Thursday 18th July, 7.30pm

Tickets from Opera Holland Park

Helen and Toby Carr return to York Early Music Festival with their new Lute song programme, showcasing on English songs from the 16th and 17th centuries to the world premiere of songs by contemporary composers, Anna Semple and Ben Rowarth.

This performance is the final of three in Helen’s series of concerts as artist in residence at the York Early Music Festival this year.

Wednesday 10 July 9.30pm, Merchant Adventurer’s Hall

Tickets available from YEMF

Former BBC New Generation Artists mezzo soprano Helen Charlston & Consone Quartet come together for this lunchtime concert, the second in Helen’s series as Artist in Residence at this year’s York Early Music Festival.

As we journey through the intimate world of song, let Robert Schumann’s beguiling Frauenliebe und -leben, Clara Schumann’s evocative Op.13 and songs by Felix & Fanny Mendelssohn whisk you into a world of romanticism. Presented in new arrangements for Period String Quartet and Voice (rather than voice and piano as one might expect) the intimacy and directness of chamber music is the centre of this story, transporting us all to a new world of life and love.

Tickets available from YEMF

Tuesday 9 July, 12.00pm, National Centre for Early Music

Many of the ‘songs’ we are hearing at this year’s festival naturally incline towards the secular, but tonight’s concert is about the sacred. Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres are an exquisitely emotional depiction of that most human of sounds: the cry of mourning. Couperin stated that, while he wrote the Leçons for two sopranos, “all other types of voices may sing them”. As a lower voice I have long hoped to perform them, and I can’t think of a better team with whom to share this intensely personal and devotional work.

Monday 8 July 9.15pm, Merchant Taylor’s Hall

Tickets from YEMF

Helen joins St Albans Bach Choir for the final concert of their director Andrew Lucas. Together they perform two of Mozart’s most-loved pieces: the Requiem and Coronation Mass.

Saturday 6th July, 7.30pm, St Albans Cathedral

Tickets available from St Albans Bach Choir

Helen closes the Clifton International Festival of Music in a performance of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder with the Bristol Symphony Orchestra at Clifton Cathedral.

Saturday 15th June, 7.30pm

PROGRAMME

Maurice Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin

Gustav Mahler Rückert-Lieder

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 in B minor (Pathétique)

Bristol Symphony Orchestra / Helen Charlston (Mezzo-Soprano) / Robert Weaver (Conductor)

Tickets available from Clifton International Festival of Music

Helen and Toby Carr return to Purbeck Arts Week for their first performance of their new Lute song programme, showcasing on English songs from the 16th and 17th centuries to the world premiere of songs by contemporary composers, Anna Semple and Ben Rowarth.

Tickets available from Purbeck Arts Week

St Edward’s, Corfe Castle, Wareham

Multi award-winning BBC New Generation Artist Helen Charlston is joined by pianist Sholto Kynoch for a performance of Schumann’s masterful song cycle Dichterliebe, a pinnacle of the song repertoire. Alongside this they perform songs by Schumann’s contemporaries, including Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, as well as a thrilling new work by Héloïse Werner, Knight’s Dream, commissioned in 2023 by BBC Radio 3 as a companion piece to Dichterliebe.

Wednesday 5th June, 6.15pm

“Her radiant expressiveness reached its peak in Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Op 48, Heine’s romantic journey through bliss and disillusion towards apparent resignation and resolution. With supremely sensitive playing from Kynoch, Charlston made us struggle with her over all these emotional hurdles in a superb performance, both exhausting and elating.”

Stephen Pritchard, The Observer*****

Helen heads to Andorra for the second edition of Festival Classicand to sing Piacere in their staging of Handel’s Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno.

Place du Consell hosts the performance of one of Handel's most beautiful works. In the summer of 1707, at the age of twenty-two, the composer created this work where beauty lives under the spell of pleasure, thinking that nothing will ever change, until time and disillusionment make her see what life really is. In this piece, we will reflect on the world of fashion and appearances, in a society which has made the image one of the most powerful weapons and elevated appearance to the rank of religion or almost. Performed by the Vespres d'Arnadí Baroque Orchestra, the work offers reflections entirely in tune with our times, with one of the brilliant musician's most inspired compositions.

Tickets available from Classicand

Former BBC New Generation Artists mezzo soprano Helen Charlston & Consone Quartet come together for an evening of storytelling, celebrating chamber music making in all its glory.

As we journey through the intimate world of song, let Robert Schumann’s beguiling Frauenliebe und -leben, Clara Schumann’s evocative Op.13 and songs by Felix & Fanny Mendelssohn whisk you into a world of romanticism. Presented in new arrangements for Period String Quartet and Voice (rather than voice and piano as one might expect) the intimacy and directness of chamber music is the centre of this story, transporting us all to a new world of life and love.

Tickets available from London Festival of Baroque Music

Friday 17th May 2024, 7pm

Multi award-winning BBC New Generation Artist Helen Charlston is joined by pianist Sholto Kynoch for a performance of Schumann’s masterful song cycle Dichterliebe, a pinnacle of the song repertoire. Alongside this they perform songs by Schumann’s contemporaries, including Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, as well as a thrilling new work by Héloïse Werner, Knight’s Dream, commissioned in 2023 by BBC Radio 3 as a companion piece to Dichterliebe.

Tickets from Mayfield Festival

Wednesday 1st May 2024, 7.30pm

St Dunstan’s Church, Mayfield

“Her radiant expressiveness reached its peak in Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Op 48, Heine’s romantic journey through bliss and disillusion towards apparent resignation and resolution. With supremely sensitive playing from Kynoch, Charlston made us struggle with her over all these emotional hurdles in a superb performance, both exhausting and elating.”

Stephen Pritchard, The Observer*****

English art song saw a rich renaissance in the early years of the 20th century, continuing between the wars.

This programme draws on a treasury of the finest songs of Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, Peter Warlock, Gerald Finzi and Benjamin Britten.

Helen Charlston, mezzo-soprano

Alessandro Fisher, tenor

Sholto Kynoch, piano

St John's Church, Wimbledon, SW19 4NZ, 7.30pm

Tickets available from Wimbledon International Festival

In honour of their recently released CD of music by William Byrd “flawlessly sung by the mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston, the whole thing is beautifully done” (The Guardian), Helen joins Chelys Consort of Viols in a concert performance of this repertoire in this Byrd’s 450th anniversary year.

Tickets from Leamington Music

Helen joins Joseph Middleton for a lunchtime concert at Wesley Centre Concerts in Harrogate, with music by Mahler, Hensel, Ireland, Bridge and Nathan James Dearden.

Wesley Centre Concerts 2023-24

Oxford Street, Harrogate HG1 1PP

Lunchtime Recitals (Mondays at 1pm, Admission £10)

Following on from the success of their recording of John Eccles’ Semele, Cambridge Handel Opera Company and Academy of Ancient Music come together to present another English operatic masterpiece: John Weldon’s The Judgement of Paris.

The libretto was itself designed for a contest, a musical one, with cash prizes, handsomely sponsored by a group of aristocrats. John Weldon, organist of New College Oxford, was the youngest finalist. Unexpectedly, his setting – which improves on Congreve’s libretto ­– won first place in the ‘Musick Prize’, triumphing over the more conservative submissions by the three older and more experienced finalists, John Eccles, Daniel Purcell, and Gottfried Finger.

Anna Dennis Venus / Kitty Whately Pallas /Helen Charlston Juno

Thomas Walker Mercury / Jonathan Brown Paris

Anna Cavaliero Attendant 1 /Aksel Rykkvin Attendant 2

Academy of Ancient Music / Julian Perkins director

Tickets now available

BBC New Generation Artists on Monday Lunchtime

When writing his 1840 song cycle Dichterliebe Robert Schumann turned to Heinrich Heine’s book of poetry, the Lyrisches Intermezzo, to choose his text to set to music. This book contains 64 poems, many of which are very direct and concise, often comprising just 8 lines of text. Schumann picked 16 gems that became his song cycle that forms the centre of this programme.

As a prelude to the cycle, we return to the Lyrisches Intermezzo to explore some of the poems left behind. In settings by Schumann’s 19th century contemporaries: Hensel, Loewe, Mendelssohn and Lang, we celebrate Heine’s poetry and bring it into the 21st century with a new BBC Radio 3 commission by Héloïse Werner.

Helen Charlston (Mezzo Soprano) & Sholto Kynoch (Piano)

“Magical – Charlston’s feeling for a phrase’s shape never wavers… Kynoch has the ability to nail the opening mood of a song, something he absolutely achieved in the light first bars of Ständchen. Charlston told the story beautifully… a masterclass of legato from both.”

(Seen and Heard International, March 2023)

Also broadcast LIVE on BBC Radio 3

Tickets available from Wigmore Hall

Helen and Toby Carr give a lunchtime concert as part of the first full BREMF since 2019. They share their Battle Cry programme, as featured on their Delphian Records CD of the same name, which recently won the 2023 BBC Music Magazine Vocal Award.

Saturday 21st October 2023 / St Nicholas Church, Brighton

“These characters come alive in Charlston’s flexible mezzo, surely one of the most exciting voices in the new generation of British singers” Gramophone

TICKETS available direct from BREMF

When writing his 1840 song cycle Dichterliebe Robert Schumann turned to Heinrich Heine’s book of poetry, the Lyrisches Intermezzo, to choose his text to set to music. This book contains 64 poems, many of which are very direct and concise, often comprising just 8 lines of text. Schumann picked 16 gems that became his song cycle that forms the centre of this programme.

As a prelude to the cycle, we return to the Lyrisches Intermezzo to explore some of the poems left behind. In settings by Schumann’s 19th century contemporaries: Hensel, Loewe, Mendelssohn and Lang, we celebrate Heine’s poetry and bring it into the 21st century with a new BBC Radio 3 commission by Héloïse Werner, which receives it’s world premiere today.

Helen Charlston (Mezzo Soprano) & Sholto Kynoch (Piano)

“Magical – Charlston’s feeling for a phrase’s shape never wavers… Kynoch has the ability to nail the opening mood of a song, something he absolutely achieved in the light first bars of Ständchen. Charlston told the story beautifully… a masterclass of legato from both.”

(Seen and Heard International, March 2022)

Holywell Music Room, Oxford

16th October 2023, 1pm

Tickets available from Oxford International Song Festival