Helen Charlston, Sholto Kynoch, Temple Church review - fine singing, powerful stage presence

Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston just gets better and better, both as singer and as actor. Last night’s recital at Temple Church had an unusual and wide-ranging programme – consisting of a first half hopping through the centuries, followed by a complete performance of Schumann’s “Kerner-Lieder” cycle.

Charlston and Sholto Kynoch had originally devised this programme for last autumn’s Oxford International Song Festival. It certainly looked very appealing on paper, with all kinds of music to discover. And so it proved.

The first half worked brilliantly as a sequence, with all kinds of unexpected twists, turns and, not least when the singer joined Kynoch at the piano to play the upper, hand-crossing part of the Bach/Kurtág “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit”. At the end of the sequence, there was another diversion – singer and pianist went on a walkabout, both singing, into Temple Church’s echoing round nave.

It was a delight to witness the consummate ease with which – perhaps through her regular work as a part of Les Arts Florissants – Charlston now steps so boldly and happily forth into the French 17th century, either real, as in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s “Sans frayeur dans ce bois” or pastiched, as in a divinely happy Reynaldo Hahn “À Chloris”.

An aside to that: it all seems so long ago that the acting of opera singers was ridiculed. George Bernard Shaw wrote that “operatic actors, so far from being free from mannerisms, wholly substitute mannerisms of the feeblest sort for acting.” Helen Charlston’s acting has nothing of that, It is increasingly authentic, assured and clearly comes from deep. “I am not yours” by Anna Semple, a mini-opera where a woman’s suffering at the hands of a man become a metaphor for the abuse of the planet, was expressed with total conviction, and powerful stage presence.

It is a marvel that the UK is blessed with a generation of such fabulous song accompanists – James Baillieu, Joseph Middleton and Sholto Kynoch – born within a few years of each other. A remarkable feature of Kynoch’s work last night was his lightness of touch as if playing a lute, allowing the singer the freedom, for example, to provide dramatic shape and to word-paint Monteverdi’s “Si dolce è'l tormento”.

Kynoch also provided remarkable shape to the Schumann Kerner cycle. The work of Gerhaher and Huber has reinforced the idea of Schumann had complete genius as a builder of groups of songs into longer structures, and this was a performance with real dramatic shape. The final pair of songs is sparse and bleak, and yet the craft and the presence of these two performers kept the audience completely rapt.

There was another reminder of quite how truly mesmerising Charlston’s musicality can be in the encore, Purcell’s “Evening Hymn”. Her control, legato, the flow and the shaping of everything, the pacing of the ending: it’s just all so good. The perfect trill and the gloriously held final note – I could have written the review about just that – set the seal on a fine evening of song, which also gave a fascinating snapshot of the ways in which Helen Charlston’s many-faceted artistry continues to develop.

• More classical reviews on theartsdesk