Love's Labyrinth

Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston closes the Festival with her latest ingenious programme with Oxford Song’s Artistic Director, Sholto Kynoch. The Guardian awarded their 2023 ‘Knight’s Dream’ five stars and wrote that Helen ‘mesmerised with the blackcurrant quality of her voice, her even tone, liquid phrasing and her wonderfully expressive face’.

Tonight their programme is focused on two figures from Greek mythology. Ariadne and Phaedra were both married to Theseus: Ariadne was cruelly betrayed by him, while Phaedra attempted to seduce his son Hippolytus before being overwhelmed by guilt and taking her own life. Haydn portrayed Ariadne’s despair and fury in his 1790 dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos, which quickly became a hit, not least during Haydn’s celebrity years in England. Nearly 200 years later, in 1975, Britten wrote his final vocal work, the cantata Phaedra, for Janet Baker. It is a thrilling and rigorously concise telling of the story of Phaedra, which deliberately nods to its Classical and Baroque forerunners. Around these monologues, Helen and Sholto follow the threads of timeless myths, in music by Schubert, Barbara Strozzi, Reynaldo Hahn and Héloïse Werner, as well as the world premiere of a specially commissioned work by Richard Barnard. The perfect end to a fortnight of Stories in Song.