Dame Ethel Smyth - Mass in D review | Erica Jeal's classical album of the week

The Guardian 80

(Chandos)
The BBCSO and Sakari Oramo give Smyth’s era-defying mass the grand recording it deserves, alongside the overture to her opera The Wreckers

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.