Battle Cry: She Speaks

Helen Charlston is the rising star among young British mezzos, and this fine recording with theorbo player Toby Carr reveals why—in a recital programme designed to exorcise the ghosts of all those dead, dishonoured or abandoned heroines who haunt the vocal repertoire of the Baroque, from Monteverdi’s Ariadne through to Purcell’s Dido. They’re acknowledged not so much with tears as with resolve: hence Battle Cry, which is specifically the title of a new song cycle written as the programme’s centrepiece by Owain Park. Revisiting the “troubled women” theme in music where the soundworlds of the present and the past combine, it plays to both performers’ strengths, and in particular to the arresting presence of a singer who delivers passionate intensity in an unlaboured way. Charlston ends with an account of Purcell’s Evening Hymn that brings her troubled heroines to peace.