“I feel I must fight for Der Wald because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.” So wrote Ethel Smyth – and if you picture the cause of music written by British women as a ship, ploughing through the treacherous waters of 20th-century sexual politics, it does indeed have Smyth as its figurehead, dressed in tweeds and holding her cigar clear of the spray. Thanks to Glyndebourne and others, her opera The Wreckers has had lots of recent attention, but Der Wald was arguably the more important work. In 1903, it became the first opera composed by a woman to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. The second – Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin – was 113 years later.
This, Der Wald’s first recording, argues its case persuasively. The conductor, John Andrews, manages to make the hour-long score sound at once concise and expansive, and we sense the hint of mystery that Smyth wanted to engender with her depiction of the primeval forest setting. The music draws unashamedly on Wagner and Brahms, but not in a way that feels derivative; highlights include a lovely, harmonically adventurous chorus of spirits to open and close the work, and a scene for the central couple blossoming into a love duet that culminates in a heartfelt ode to the forest itself.
Stream on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
It is sung, in English (the premiere was in German), by a cast that does Smyth’s music full justice. Natalya Romaniw’s bright soprano as Röschen is set off nicely by Claire Barnett-Jones’s mezzo, sounding imperious yet warm as Iolanthe, the feared woman of the woods whose eyes are drawn by Heinrich’s “thighs of steel”. Robert Murray sounds suitably muscular in that role, and though the veteran Andrew Shore’s baritone has a cumbersome vibrato these days, he puts it to good use in the character role of the Pedlar, never seen without his pet bear.
This week’s other pick
Another British work you’ve probably never heard before is Hubert Parry’s 1880 cantata Scenes from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which Elgar and others considered a starting point for “modern” English music. It sounds sumptuous in its own first recording, out on Chandos, with the London Mozart Players and Crouch End Festival Chorus conducted by William Vann, and a top-notch quartet of soloists including Sarah Connolly and David Butt Philip.
