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Reviewer : Alexandra Coghlan Helen Charlston’s solo debut, ‘Battle Cry – She Speaks’ (Delphian, 7/22) launched the young British mezzo’s recording career with five-star reviews and major awards, including Gramophone’s 2023 Concept Album of the Year. But if concept was king there, in a bold pairing of 17th-century and contemporary works, Charlston’s follow-up lets the music do the talking.
Joining forces with Sounds Baroque – the starry trio of harpsichordist Julian Perkins, violist Jonathan Manson and William Carter on theorbo and baroque guitar – Charlston takes us on to familiar territory with Purcell songs, spiced with a handful of lesser-known works by Eccles and Daniel Purcell, with a bonus in the form of Christopher Simpson’s characterful Divisions in D major and Blow’s Morlake Ground, a stylish showcase for Manson and Perkins.
Charlston’s mezzo is a quality instrument: absolute purity and precision allied to a sober beauty of tone, with a wonderfully charry edge to the bottom register. But neither the repertoire nor her delivery encourages us to linger on the voice itself: the storytelling is the thing. With a few exceptions (‘Music for a while’, ‘I attempt from love’s sickness’, ‘If music be the food of love’) the focus is on the recitative-ariosos – the miniature scenas that pack an entire drama into just a few minutes.
The Virgin Mary expostulates fiercely, assertive from that first imperative ‘Tell me’, a mercurial mix of maternal tenderness and queenly advocacy. It’s a tour de force. Elsewhere there are a subtler set of emotional shades in ‘I love and I must’ and the obsessively circling variations of ‘What a sad fate is mine’, deftly varied in tone and spirit not just by Charlston – by turns desolate and self-pitying – but by Perkins and Manson in their sympathetic shading. In ‘Music for a while’ it’s the accompaniment that sets the tone: Manson’s liquid opening ground, the urgency of Perkins’s harpsichord transforming the song into an incantation.
Charlston is at her best in darkness – mourning, loss, a broken heart – and there are moments elsewhere where some leavening lushness or lightness of tone might have softened the sterner lines:
the trembling erotic desire of Eccles’s ‘Restless in thought’, with its astonishingly sensual opening melisma; the ravishing central section of Daniel Purcell’s ‘Morpheus thou gentle god’.
There are no booklet notes included with this release. Instead we get a Q&A between Charlston and Emma Kirkby – a fascinating window on to this repertoire from the inside, certainly, but lacking the context so many of these narrative miniatures, with their specific characters and circumstances, really need to hit their mark – however expressive the performance. |
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