Music at Paxton - Notes of Old

Paxton House 23/7/25

Helen Charlston (Mezzo-Soprano)

Sholto Kynoch (Piano)

 In my EMR Blog, ‘A Singer's Life’, soon to be published as a book, I wrote a chapter about how to programme a song recital. Drawing on my experience as a professional singer for over 40 years, I delved into questions of repertoire, recital length, variety and balance. I talked about great recitalists I had worked with, like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Peter Pears, Galina Vishnevskaya and Hans Hotter, and great recitalists I had heard live, like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau,  Tom Krause, Gundula Janowitz, Janet Baker, Benjamin Luxon and Tom Hampson.

I explored the way song recitals have changed fundamentally in my lifetime from a chronological programme starting with some early music, some Mozart, a bit of Schubert or Schumann, with some Faure or Debussy thrown in, to a much more focused programme revolving round a theme or a particular idea. The creation of the ‘Songmakers' Almanac’ in the 1980s had been revolutionary in this context.

When I read the programme for tonight's recital at Paxton House in the Scottish Borders, as part of this year's Music at Paxton, with Helen Charlston (mezzo-soprano) and Sholto Kynoch (piano), I have to admit that my heart sank! A seemingly unrelated progression of single songs with mixed languages and styles in the first half, and an apparently randomly selected little known Schumann song cycle in the second half, seemed to promise the most bonkers recital imaginable. 

And yet, despite everything,  and you'll be glad to hear this, what those of us lucky enough to be present at the lovely Paxton House tonight heard, was one of the most fabulous recitals I have been privileged to attend for many, many years.  

Why? Let me try to explain.

 First of all, there was the simply glorious voice of Helen Charlston. I first heard Ms Charlston at the nearby Lammermuir Festival, where I was impressed by the sheer beauty of her instrument. We are fortunate in Great Britain at the moment to have several notable mezzo-sopranos making their mark internationally - Karen Cargill, Catriona Morison, Kitty Whately and Beth Taylor in particular.  To that shortlist, we can confidently add the name of Helen Charlston. 

All of these fine singers have recognisable individual timbres which distinguish them from the rest. For me, Ms Charlston's upper register is her Superpower, a rich, golden syrup of voluptuousness held together with an almost other-worldly legato line, seemingly unable to produce an ugly sound at any time. Her lower and middle registers are far from lacking, but it is the sheer gleaming richness of the top that thrills me. 

 Sholto Kynoch and Helen Charlston put together as eclectic a programme as it is possible to imagine. As Mr Kynoch said in his introduction, the structure of the recital was almost dependant on its lack of structure, with an enigmatic title,  Notes of Old, leading us through an examination of Love, Nature and the very essence of Music itself.

Now this could all come over as self-indulgently pretentious, and in less capable hands, it might have been, but such was the intellectual vigour of the programming choices and the sheer exuberance of the performance that we were swept away by the audacity of the concept!

 Starting off with an exquisite pianistic miniature by the Spanish composer, Federico Mompou, beautifully played by Mr Kynoch, Ms Charlston announced herself in a mélodie by Reynaldo Hahn, 'Néère', a delightful rendition of a work by Venezuela's most famous Classical composer.

Leaping back in time and crossing linguistic frontiers with nonchalance, the duo performed next a song of intriguing modernity by Claudio Monteverdi, 'Si dolce e'l tormento'. Admittedly, it sounded odd to be accompanied by a modern concert grand piano, but when you are sweeping aside convention every minute or so, why not play Monteverdi on a piano? It worked surprisingly well, and it seemed that the piano’s acoustics underlined the audacity of Monteverdi’s harmonies.

Jumping on to J S Bach, we heard the opening aria from his cantata, ‘Wiederstehe doch der Sünde’, warning us all to resist the poison of sin, perhaps a warning that Schubert didn’t take seriously enough. It seems clear now that his early death was as a result of contracting syphilis in his early 20s. We heard his Wiedersehn, a song of unconditional love.

Ms Charlston had a short break while Mr Kynoch played an arrangement for piano of the opening sonatina of Bach’s early cantata, ‘Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit’ by Kurtàg.

 Throughout the recital thus far, we had been delighted by the lovely voice of Helen Charlston, and in ‘I am not yours’ by the young composer Anna Semple, we were intoxicated by an a capella rendition of a work written in collaboration with the librettist, Susannah Pearse. Full of scoops, ululations, humming and, thankfully, singing, our ears were cajoled and soothed, and filled with extraordinary sounds. It sounds weird but it really wasn’t, assisted nobly by Ms Charlston’s ability to hit the right notes at all times (I assume?!?) and her powers of story telling.

The fact that she sang the whole recital from memory was a huge bonus, and her wonderfully expressive performance was a model for all young singers.

The concert went smoothly from Semple to more Schubert, more Hahn and on to Pauline Viardot. The great diva, much adored by Berlioz, Fauré, Gounod and Massenet, was a decent composer herself, and the song we heard was a vibrant ‘Souvenir de L’Espagne’.

Ravel’s early song, ‘Ballade de la Reine morte d’ aimer’ (Ballad of the Queen who died of Love), showed off the partnership between voice and piano, Mr Kynoch giving full rein to the bell-like passages while Ms Charlston poured all her emotion into the text.

Another piano miniature by Mompou followed, with the singer sitting at the piano, delicately adding more harmonies, ‘mains-croisées’, and this sharing was reciprocated in the final song of the first half, Charpentier’s ‘Sans frayeur dans ce bois’. A song over a chaconne in the piano in which the poet enters a dark wood, feeling no fear, moved amiably on until, at the end of the song, Mr Kynoch started to sing the bass line, and the pair walked offstage until the repeat had ended. It was brilliantly done, and proved a terrific finale to the first half.

 The second half was less controversial, consisting of Robert Schumann’s ‘Zwölf Gedichte von Justinus Kerner’, a less well-known song cycle from the extraordinary year of 1840, when the composer wrote more than 150 songs. He was young (30) and in love, and there was no evidence of the incipient madness that was to kill him 16 years later. As I wrote last year, after singing ‘Dichterliebe’ again after a hiatus of 30 years myself, I have had to come to terms with the songs of Schumann. Music I had considered dull and unchallenging for most of my career has reinvigorated my later years, both as a performer and a listener.

I had never come across this cycle before, but Helen Charlston and Sholto Kynoch made a very good case for its wider recognition. Chock full of standard Romantic era questions about Love and Nature and the part music plays in finding the answers, the poems of the German poet and physician, Justinus Kerner, were set with the utmost skill and poignancy by Schumann in that amazingly creative year of 1840, when he married Clara Wieck.

 The duo explored the sound world of Schumann with particular ardour, Mr Kynoch finding sonorities in the piano part that were quite delicious, while Ms Charlston poured out glorious phrases, beautifully held together by her superb sense of legato (the skill that fine singers use to build up seamless lines of song). One or two of my fellow audience members mentioned that they were uncomfortable with the piano lid being fully open, as they were concerned that the voice was occasionally covered. I must say that I didn’t feel this to be the case, but it might be a thought for the future to have the lid on the half stick. Ms Charlston’s voice is not enormous, and a concert grand makes a lot of noise, so a small compromise might be worthwhile. It is Ms Charlston’s natural tone that I most prize, and so anything that allows that naturalness to be heard clearly must be a good thing. So many voices, particularly women’s voices, can sound unnecessarily manufactured, so that when you find one so straightforward in projection and timbre as hers, it seems a pity to risk losing some of that quality through an imbalance between piano and voice.

 We shall hear her again tomorrow in Duns Parish Church, in combination with Toby Carr on theorbo, and that will represent an altogether different set of acoustic questions and answers. You can read about that in a separate review on the EMR!