Dame Ethel Smyth: Mass in D review – brick-throwing suffragette's sumptuous lost work

Here’s Sakari Oramo filling in another gap in the British repertoire, one that you probably didn’t even know was there. Depending on your favourite story about her, Ethel Smyth is the brick-throwing suffragette conducting her fellow Holloway inmates with a toothbrush, or the bisexual society lady sketched by John Singer Sargent, or the rebellious young woman who defied her father to study composition at the Leipzig Conservatory but who dropped out because she didn’t think the teaching was up to much. Her Mass in D, premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893 but almost absent from the choral society conveyor belt since, is as grand in scope as one might expect from such a woman. It’s gratifying to find it getting the kind of recording it deserves from forces who can do justice to its ambition.

Smyth later said that writing the mass “sweated out” any thoughts she was harbouring of converting to Catholicism, and the atmosphere is operatic rather than devout – and so on this disc the stirring, seaswept overture to The Wreckers, her best-known opera, makes for an excellent prelude. In the mass itself, Oramo follows Smyth’s request to place the exuberant Gloria at the end, so it sounds structured for the concert hall rather than the cathedral. The opening Kyrie sets a scene full of tension, with music serious enough to be asking mercy for any amount of sin; but there’s a hint of consolation towards the end of the movement, and the Credo bursts on in an eruption of joy – the most striking of several dramatic plays of light and shade. The four vocal soloists are a little far back in the mix, and there are fleeting moments when one wants more fullness of tone from the two men, but the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus are on excellent, sumptuous form, and this recording should win the mass many new fans.

Also out this month

There are more discoveries to be had, on a smaller scale, in Her Voice, the Neave Trio’s album of distinctive and distinguished chamber works by Louise Farrenc, Amy Beach and Rebecca Clarke. But for sheer enjoyment, try the folk-classical group Kottos’s new release Songs & Dances, in which they take pieces by composers including Bartók, Vaughan Williams and Vivaldi and reimagine them for a quartet of accordion, bouzouki, recorder and lyrical cello. It’s all effortlessly musical, and somehow gets to the heart of everything in joyous fashion.