Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Britain's greatest female composer, wrote six operas. The Boatswain's Mate, composed in Egypt in 1913-14, and first performed in 1916, was far and away the most popular of them, and between the wars, was often performed. It is a wonderfully tuneful and funny work, the most successful of all the British operas of the period, using folk music to evoke English rural life. Smyth was a close friend of Emmeline Pankhurst. She had been strongly involved with the suffragette movement immediately before she composed The Boatswain's Mate, and it's generally considered her most feminist opera (the overture quotes 'The March of the Women', her famous suffragette song). Smyth wrote her own libretto, adapting a story and play by W. W. Jacobs.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Oramo with an exceptional quartet of soloists give a vivid and heartfelt interpretation of Smyth’s earliest large-scale choral work. Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. Smyth tended to be marginalized as a ‘woman composer’, as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream, yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticized for not measuring up to the standard of her male competitors.
The renowned violinist Tasmin Little returns to Chandos 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 close to her heart with her usual warmth and dexterity.
August 18th marks the 100th anniversary of th e 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting women in the US the right to vote. A fitting time then for our release of the World Premier Recording of Ethel Smyths late masterpiece The Prison. Smyth left home at nineteen to study composition in Leipzig. In the company of Clara Schumann and her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, she met and won the admiration of composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvoák, and Grieg. Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Met, in 1903.
First new material from the American musician in 28 years. It's About Time' contains eight new tracks - two of which are cover versions. Smyth herself commented, 'I've been touring and playing shows with the same band for 12 years, just having a blast, and I finally went into the zone of writing these songs I felt were poignant and relevant for me. I started to realise this is a real thing that's happening and just went with it'.