Chelys Consort of Viols featuring Helen Charlston
Biography Chelys Consort of Viols featuring Helen Charlston
Helen Charlston
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.
Chelys Consort of Viols
has garnered a reputation for its faithful yet fresh inter preta tions of the consort repertoire. The members are among the UK’s leading exponents of the viol, particularly as a consort instrument, and their viols are strung entirely in gut (as would have been the case historically), lending them a particularly distinctive sound.
Chelys performs in the UK and internationally, has broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and in 2019 made its Wigmore Hall début alongside Dame Emma Kirkby, with whom the ensemble has also recorded an album of works by John Dowland and his contemporaries. This and its three other releases on the BIS label have received considerable critical acclaim, The Strad praising the ‘devoted skill and sensitivity’ of the playing, and Gramophone declaring this to be unquestionably ‘the most beautiful recording of the Lachrimae’, while the consort’s Purcell album received a 5-star review in BBC Music Magazine.
The consort frequently enjoys working with other artists, as in their collaboration with Fieri Consort for ‘Amavi’, a recording of works by Michael East concluding with a new work by composer Jill Jarman, whose long association with Chelys has continued with the ground-breaking new project ‘The Language of Bells’, featuring percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.
