Dame Ethel Smyth: The Prison
Chandos Records

Many a world premiere recording appears relatively soon after a work's creation, which makes the ninety-year gap between the writing of Dame Ethel Smyth's The Prison and the release of this recording one of the more remarkable things about it. Its text, adapted by the English composer from a work written by Henry Bennet Brewster, is a metaphysical dialogue involving a man alone in a prison cell reflecting on his life, the prison functioning literally and figuratively as a physical jail but also as a symbol for the self and its inner struggles. In discussing with his soul how to come to terms with death, the prisoner aspires through contemplation to free himself from earthly desires so as to achieve spiritual release.

Few have a bio as fascinating as Smyth's (1858-1944), whose works span five decades. The London-born composer came to her vocation early when a governess introduced her to Beethoven, which eventually led to studies at Leipzig Conservatory and with her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Though her efforts were praised by the likes of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvorak, and Grieg, she struggled to have her music accepted on its own terms (one critic apparently deemed her music “a remarkable achievement—for a woman”). After publishing her first compositions in the 1880s, she wrote a number of operas, the first of which, Fantasio, appeared in 1898; the second, Der Wald, premiered four years later in Berlin and in 1903 at The Metropolitan Opera, making Smyth the first woman to have an opera performed at the New York venue (the next would be Kaaija Saariaho, whose L'amour de loin was presented in 2016). A return to chamber works and songs ensued in the early 1900s and reflected Smyth's embrace of a more modern style less influenced by German romanticism. Later in her life, a second career as a writer developed, resulting in ten non-fiction works, and she also became a participant in the Suffragette movement in England, her militancy landing her in Holloway Prison in 1912 for three weeks (for throwing stones at the house of the Colonial Secretary, apparently). Even then, she couldn't be cowed: when the conductor Thomas Beecham visited her, he found her using a toothbrush through the bars of her cell to conduct inmates in the courtyard in a performance of her “March of the Women.”

As unusual as Smyth's life is the work's structure. Pitched as a sixty-four-minute symphony in two parts (“Close on Freedom” and “The Deliverance”), The Prison—Smyth's only symphony and her final work (she was seventy-two when it was finished in 1930)—is perhaps better described as an oratorio or cantata. Four elements constitute the work's sonorous sound world, conductor James Blachly's Experiential Orchestra and Chorus and soprano Sarah Brailey, who personifies “The Soul,” and bass-baritone Dashon Burton, who sings the role of “The Prisoner.” The performance is illuminated by her ravishing tone, his authoritative presence, and the superb rendering of the score by Blachly and company. (The NYC-based Experiential Orchestra makes good on its name, by the way. With its founder at the helm, the company has repeatedly elevated its programming with innovative ideas—inviting audiences to dance to Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, for example, and surrounding them with thirty-six oboes and bassoons during performances of music by Lully and Rameau.)

Musically, the work contains many remarkable passages. The stirring opening minutes juxtapose expressions by the prisoner and soul, which not only accentuates the dramatic contrast between the singers' voices but also their luminous character. The coupling of vocals and instrumental elements is masterfully handled, Smyth's orchestration typically providing a luxuriant ground for the singers' resonant voices. Generally speaking, the work's tone is less fraught with agitation but rather inclines to serenity and soothes with peacefulness and calm.

Smyth gives each singer several splendid sequences, and Brailey and Burton use them to full advantage. Certainly one high point is a solo spotlight for the soprano towards the end of the second half that features material so magnificent (“Endless and unchangeable as the milky way, …”) it invites comparison to Mahler. Exemplifying her adventurous sensibility, Smyth elsewhere startles the listener with woodwind phrases that evoke the twitter of birds outside the prisoner's cell. One questionable moment arises, however, when the melody from “The Last Post” is directly referenced, a disruptive move that seems ill-suited to the music when it otherwise so wholly embodies Smyth's voice.

Part-by-part analysis can be used to identify those sections where a Brahms influence is detectable or where a particular Wagner- or Debussy-like episode emerges, but perhaps one is best to simply open oneself up to Smyth's creation and experience it on its terms. Blachly himself reported that at the moment he and the musicians began rehearsing the work, he found himself “overtaken by the power of her music and the depth of her orchestration.” The work's sensual power and the manner by which each passage segues naturally into the next certainly encourage that kind of response.

August 2020