Helen Charlston nominated for BBC Music Magazine Award

January 27, 2023

Helen Charlston

City Music Foundation is pleased to announce that Helen Charlston’s record, Battle Cry, has been nominated for the Vocal Award in this year’s BBC Music Magazine Awards.

This powerful yet understated recital of modern and seventeenth-century works aims to revisit but also to re-balance the obsession of earlier music with female abandonment and lament.

The stories of women such as Dido and Ariadne have been told and retold throughout history. Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston reconsiders the assumed helplessness of those often seen as being left behind by male adventure and success.

A recent work commissioned for Charlston from the composer Owain Park further takes up the challenge of giving ‘abandoned women’ their own platform, as well as exploring new possibilities for an instrumental pairing – that of voice and theorbo – that remains little explored in contemporary music.

Battle Cry was commissioned by City Music Foundation.

You can vote now for Battle Cry to win the Vocal Award in 2023’s BBC Music Magazine Awards.

Acclaimed for her musical interpretation, presence and “warmly distinctive tone” (The Telegraph), Helen Charlston has quickly cemented herself as a key performer in the next generation of British singers.