Hexham Abbey 17th May 2025

The Hexham Orpheus Choir did a fine job of publicising this concert.  The choir’s zeal reflected both its fear that few Hexham concert goers had heard of Ethel Smyth and their confidence that her Mass in D is a wonderful piece of music.  In her time Smyth was recognised as a great British composer, but after her death (80 years ago), her music quickly vanished from the concert hall.  It was not until 2022 that her Mass was programmed in the Proms (“a jewel in the crown of British choral music”, in the BBC’s words) and her opera, The Wreckers, triumphantly staged at Glyndebourne. The Wreckers’ overture–tense, exciting, menacing and fateful–made a brilliant opening to this Orpheus Choir concert

There can be no doubt that the overriding reason why the post-war musical establishment ignored Smyth’s work was because she was a woman, and in its concert advertising the Orpheus Choir made excellent use of suffragette imagery.  But the important point musically is not that Smyth was a woman composer (any more than Elgar was a man composer or Britten a gay composer) but that she was a composer — a very good composer — who happened to be a woman.   What matters here is when she was composing (between 1880 and 1930) and where she placed herself: in the German as well as the British romantic tradition.  She had this is common with Edward Elgar. 

Brahms was a friend, mentor and inspiration and it was smart programming to choose his Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny) to end the first half of this concert.  The song was beautifully sung but following The Wreckers’unashamedly aggressive, bold and obdurate overture, Brahms’ sense of fate seemed, how should I put this, a bit mawkish.  In concert its dreamy ending contrasted strikingly with the vigour of Smyth’s music.

All serious classical composers, it seems, need to write a Mass, both as a mark of religious 

faith (Smyth was a High Anglican when she wrote hers in 1891 though not by the time it was successfully revived in 1924) and to claim a place in the classical pantheon.  The words of a Mass have an established narrative force, as part of a church service, but for concert listeners their settings are inevitably referred back to previous composers’ Masses. In his discussion of the Mass as a musical form the musicologist Donald Tovey suggests that   “Dame Ethel Smyth’s Mass owes nothing to tradition but is undoubtedly a work inspired by its text.”    He cites the joyful mood sustained in the Gloria as an example of the close attention which Smyth paid to matching the music — in this case “the radiant melody”– to the religious meaning of every part of each movement’s verse.

For me this gives Smyth’s mass a decidedly operatic feel. Each part of the Mass has its own sense of drama, with the voices scored as instruments.  In the Hexham Orpheus Choir performance, the voices were dominant in the shaping of sonic textures.  The Choir showed great skill in their volume control (a tribute to Mark Edwards’s rehearsal and conducting authority) while the four soloists (Rachael Heater, Valerie Reid, Austin Gunn and Joshua Lane) were wonderfully unfussy, always concerned with sound not personality.  It was a pleasure to hear voices so easily instrumental — the alto in the Sanctus, women’s voices in the Benedictus, the tenor in the Agnus Dei; the moving contrast between its deep sadness and the triumph of the Gloria (which Smyth moves, against the usual flow of the church service, to the end).  The final celebratory swell of the music, voices and instruments perfectly in consonance seemed, appropriately, slightly vulgar. There was a remarkable lack of restraint in the defiance of death, and special mention should be made here of timpanist Matt Moore who never flagged in driving the music on to the final chord, when choir and orchestra became as one and the adventure ended.       

The BBC’s claim in the 2022 Prom Season was clearly right: this is one of the great masses.  And on this showing the Hexham Orpheus Choir is becoming a very fine choir.  A memorable evening indeed. 

© Simon Frith