Experiential Orchestra and Chorus / James Blachly ETHEL SMYTH The Prison

THE PRISON

Lucy Stevens / Elizabeth Marcus / Berkeley Ensemble / Odaline de la Martinez ETHEL SMYTH Songs and Ballads

SONGS AND BALLADS

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo ETHEL SMYTH Mass in D - Overture to "The Wreckers"

Ethel Smyth was one of England’s foremost Victorian composers, and a prominent suffragette. She was the first female composer to be honoured with a Damehood. She studied composition with Carl Reineke in Leipzig (alongside Dvorák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky) and then privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg (who introduced her to Brahms and Clara Schumann). Her Mass in D is her only large-scale religious work, although it was certainly composed for the concert hall rather than the church. Scored for 4 soloists, choir, and orchestra, the Mass in D sets the usual six parts of the mass, but is performed with the Gloria at the end, not second, at the instruction of the composer. Her opera The Wreckers, set in mid-eighteenth-century Cornwall, is considered by some critics to be the ‘most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten’. The Overture sets the scene wonderfully, as well as introducing the main thematic material to follow. Sakari Oramo and his BBC forces are joined by an outstanding quartet of soloists for this Surround Sound recording.

Tasmin Little / John Lenehan CLARA SCHUMANN - DAME ETHEL SMYTH - AMY BEACH

The renowned violinist and exclusive Chandos artist Tasmin Little returns with a line-up of three women composers whose lives share some features but also significant differences that illustrate the complex lives of female musicians.

Clara Schumann, Dame Ethel Smyth, and Amy Beach all came from families that encouraged their musical interests but balked, in varying degrees, at professional training and engagement. All three composers draw on the influence of Robert Schumann and Brahms; Beach and Smyth, in particular, were fond of metrical and motivic manipulation.

Tasmin Little plays this music, so close to her heart, with her usual warmth and dexterity. The manuscript of Clara Schumann’s final chamber work, Three Romances, declares it ‘for piano and violin’, an ordering reflected in the relative complexity of the parts, the florid passagework here played beautifully by Little’s long-term collaborator, John Lenehan.