Helen Charlston

Helen won First Prize in the 2018 Handel Singing Competition, was a Rising Star of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment for 2017-19 and is a 2018 City Music Foundation Artist. This season she will make debuts with Academy of Ancient Music, Cambridge Handel Opera Company, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra and the Concertgebouw Kammerorchestra, as well as joining Fretwork for a solo recital programme at Wigmore Hall and York Early Music Christmas Festival. She will premiere the role of Anna in the newly completed opera Blue Electricby Tom Smail and will continue her commissioning project of lute songs with duo partner Toby Carr.

Operatic roles include Messaggera & Prosperpina/L’Orfeo(Monteverdi), Penelope/Il Ritorno d’Ilisse in patria(Monteverdi), First Witch/Dido and Aeneas, Olga/Eugene Onegin, Florence Pike/AlbertHerring, Ino/Semele, Sara/Tobias and the Angel(Dove) and Dinah/Trouble in Tahiti(Bernstein). Helen created the role of Dido in the premiere of a new chamber opera based on Virgil’s writings about Dido: Dido is Dead, by young composer Rhiannon Randle.

In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Helen commissioned the Isolation Songbook: a deeply personal journey, the fruits of which were released on Delphian in 2021, marking the anniversary of the first national lockdown in the UK. Read more about this incredible journey on Helen's website, here.


ISOLATION SONGBOOK

Helen Charlston | Michael Craddock | Alexander Soares

The feeling which many of us experienced in spring 2020 as, country by country, the world went into lockdown – a sense of life gone into standstill – was especially acute for musicians, deprived suddenly of both their livelihoods and the human connections that give their work meaning ...

 


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