Saturday’s train strike prevented me from getting to London so I listened to Sakari Oramo’s BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Prom on Radio 3 instead. The concert formed part of this season’s exploration of the music of Ethel Smyth with a performance of her Mass in D, written in 1891, and premiered two years later, also at the Albert Hall.
An imposing work, it was begun in 1889 following Smyth’s return to the UK after a decade in Germany, and is very much written in a European tradition that peers back through Brahms to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, also in the key of D. In part, it’s an affirmation of Smyth’s return to Anglicanism (it didn’t last), though it was also strongly influenced by her relationship with the Catholic Pauline Trevelyan, with whom she was in love. Yet it nevertheless rebels, iconoclastically, against liturgical tradition by wrenching the Gloria out of context and placing it last for purely musical reasons. Stylistically more consistent and less derivative than her later The Wreckers, it is also less immediate, hampered by a certain lofty stiffness in places, as much forbidding as it is impressive.
