Notes of Old: Helen Charlston & Sholto Kynoch draw together a variety of composers, echoing common themes & preoccupation in music that they love

Sholto Kynoch & Helen Charlston in rehearsal (Image from YouTube video)

Notes of Old: Mompou, Hahn, Monteverdi, Bach, Schubert, Bach arranged by György Kurtág, Anna Semple Pauline Viardot, Ravel, Marc Antoine Charpentier, Schumann; Helen Charlston, Sholto Kynoch, Temple Music; Temple Church
Reviewed 25 February 2025

The two performers drew us into to their fascinating world of influences and connections, a real duo recital as voice and piano complemented and echoed each other. 

Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston was joined by pianist Sholto Kynoch for Notes of Old at Temple Church as part of Temple Music‘s Spring season. Kynoch explained that it was a programme of music that the two performers loves, reflecting themes which are timeless preoccupations for everyone, love, nature and music. It was a programme that moved freely between the Baroque, the Romantic and the contemporary in a which which not only brought out themes, but reflected the way composers of one generation absorbed the music of another; Robert Schumann’s obsession with Bach or Reynaldo Hahn’s self-conscious classicism.

The first half mixed Mompou, Hahn, Monteverdi, Bach, Schubert, Bach arranged by György Kurtág, Anna Semple, Pauline Viardot, Ravel and Marc Antoine Charpentier. Then the second half consisted of Robert Schumann’s Zwölf Gedichte von Justinus Kerner, Op 35 where the themes from the first half of the concert seemed to be refracted and reflected through Schumann’s genius.

We began with Frederic Mompou, his piano solo Pour evoquer l’image du passé from his 1920/21 collection Charmes (Spells), each one designed for an emotional purpose. This one to evoke an image of the past, with evocative flowing textures that seemed Debussy-esque at first but developed into something more definitive.

Reynaldo Hahn’s Néère setting poem by Leconte de Lisle about invoking the past, but here given real presence by Helen Charlston’s plangent, unfolding line over Hahn’s throbbing piano, a texture very redolent of the composer. The song showed off Charlston’s wonderfully focused sense of line, the sculptural quality in her performance that was amplified by the acoustics of Temple Church (not necessarily the most obvious place for a song recital). This song flowed almost seamlessly in to Monteverdi’s Si dolce e’l tormento (So sweet is the torment) where we seemed to have similar textures but to very different effect. Here Charlston delivered magnificent words and fully integrated text and music to intense effect.

The opening aria from Bach’s cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde (Do resist sin), BWV 54 featured a long piano introduction from Kynoch where the way he wove the themes around the central throbbing texture was notable for the clarity of the keyboard reduction and the way the texture itself harked back to earlier in the recital. When Charlston did come in, her poised performance with powerful words and clearly joy in the music complemented Kynoch aptly. Schubert’s Wiedersehn (Reunion) might have begun in a lightly engaging way but both performers brought a sense of seriousness to it with Charlston imbuing the vocal line with great power. This section ended with more Bach, this time Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s transcription of the opening sinfonia of the cantata Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit. Kynoch started playing with Charlston moving to the side of the platform, then she calmly joined him at the piano. For those that know, of course, Kurtág’s transcription is one of several that he wrote to play with his wife, Marta. There were multiple layers in the affecting nature of the performance, that Kurtág created it for his beloved wife, the way Kynoch and Charlston stepped over the boundaries of conventional song recital, allied to Bach’s genius.

This was definitely not a recital where piano accompanies voice, the two performers were partners, with Kynoch’s piano contributions creating their own presence, not just in the solo items and the Baroque sinfonias but, in the second half, in Schumann’s use of the piano postlude to change the atmosphere of the song.

Helen Charlston began unaccompanied in Anna Semple’s I am not yours, a setting of poetry by Susannah Pearse that imagines Nature biting back at humankind. Charlston began on a monotone, focused, intense and rather shocking, with a variety of vocalisation. When Kynoch’s piano joined her the result was a powerful and intense piece with real edge and focus to it, and the way Semple’s music kept returning to the idea of the monotone gave it an almost ritualised feel. The last notes of Charlston’s final vocalisation (sung with her back to the audience) wafted over the piano introduction to Schubert’s Die Mutter Erde, a very different response to Nature as Mother Earth. There was a Bachian feel to the way the vocal line unfolded over the dark, rich piano; sober and serious but ultimately consoling.

Reynaldo Hahn was being self-consciously retro in his À Chloris, but Charlston concentrated not on simply wowing us with a beautiful vocal line in an undoubtedly beautiful song, but instead presented the words as a sort of meaningful drama, allied to the gorgeous melody. We then moved to Spain, for Pauline Viardot’s Canción de la Infanta (Song of the Infanta) setting a Spanish text. Viardot successfully imbued the song with a Spanish folk atmosphere, over an elegant yet simple piano, with Charlston giving the narrative real passion, reaching peak intensity at the song’s tragic end. We stayed with tragic royalty for Ravel’s early song Ballade de la reine morte d’aimer (Ballad of the Queen who died for love). Spare and neoclassical with the influence of Satie, Ravel uses the mention of bells in the text to add brilliance to the piano accompaniment and the whole was full of remarkable colours allied to a great sense of motion in the narrative.

Kynoch then played another of Mompou’s Charmes, this one to call forth joy, as it most definitely did. The first half concluded with Marc Antoine Charpentier’s Sans frayeur dans ce bois (Without fear in these woods), one of the ground bass pieces where the catchy, rhythmic underpinning seems an encouragement to engaging freedom in the vocal line (the sort of piece that Arpeggiata would develop into a real jam session). Here both Charlston and Kynoch delighted in the rhythmic felicities and the engaging, off-beat nature of the piece. Then Kynoch started humming the ground bass and the two walked off the platform into the Round Church, singing away. Pure magic.

Schumann called his group of songs setting poems by Justinus Kerner a Liederreihe (‘Song Sequence’), it came towards the end of the a series of song cycles/groups that the composer had written during his mad year of 1840, the prospect and actuality of marrying Clara releasing in him a remarkable torrent. The Kerner Lieder have no common theme or even type, no attempt at narrative and the songs themselves vary from the intimately personal to some of Schumann’s most unbuttoned.

‘Lust der Sturmnacht’ (Joy in a stormy night) began all vivid vigour, plunging us straight into the storm, but there were moments when the voice drew back from the tempest. ‘Stirb, Lieb’ und Freud’ (Die, love and joy) seemed to be Schumann at his most Bachian with Charlston’s vocal line simple, yet effective and serious, until the final verse when the narrator turns the story onto himself and the two performers brought the song to a moving conclusion. ‘Wanderlied’ (Song of travel) was Schumann at his most vigorous and swaggering, all outdoor, unbuttoned story telling.

‘Erstes Grün’ (First Green) gave us a sense of underlying melancholy despite surface liveliness, whilst in ‘Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend’ (Longing for woodland) the sober, serious, plangent quality of the performance made the melancholy palpable. ‘Auf das Trinkglas eines verstorbenen Freundes’ (to the wineglass of a departed friend) seemed to promise swagger, but this kept evaporating and turning darker, until the magical final verse when time seemed suspended.

We were back to our wanderings with ‘Wanderung’ but this was a night wander, everything was subdued and held back until the overflowing feelings in the final verse. There was a sober, lyric melancholy to ‘Stille liebe’ (Silent Love), which continued with the touching ‘Frage’ (Question) and was completed in the profoundly moving ‘Stille Tränen’ (Silent Tears). This is almost the ultimate romantic song, but the two held back at first only reaching overflowing emotions at the end, calmed down by Kynoch’s wondrous postlude. ‘Wer machte dich so krank?’ (Who made you so ill) seemed to echo back to Semple’s song, though here the question was simple and concentrated, and then finally ‘Alte Laute’ (Sounds from the past) where the quiet concentration evaporated to almost nothing as the poet seemed to withdraw from us.

As an encore, Purcell’s Evening Hymn brought things to a glorious close.

This was one of those programmes that, at first sight, seemed puzzling but which expanded and grew as you experienced it. The two performers drew us into to their fascinating world of influences and connections, a real duo recital as voice and piano complemented and echoed each other.