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.
Long an admirer of the score, Oramo conducted it wonderfully well, though, bringing plenty of gravitas to the Kyrie and investing the ceremonials of the Credo and Gloria with considerable grandeur. The choral singing was similarly splendid in its weight, attack and careful dynamic shading. Though Smyth’s writing for the soloists is at times ungrateful, the emotional kernel comes with the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei, cast as consecutive arias for mezzo (Bethan Langford, lovely), soprano (Nardus Williams) and tenor (Robert Murray, occasionally effortful). Bass Božidar Smiljanić did fine things with the little elsewhere that Smyth gives him.
It’s companion piece was Debussy’s Nocturnes, cleanly done, and played with scrupulous clarity. Nuages drifted with chilly elegance. Oramo took Fêtes at a sensible speed, allowing tensions to accumulate gradually without losing the music’s momentum. Though the BBC Symphony Chorus women’s voices at times sounded too prominent on the radio in Sirènes (things may have been different in the hall), Debussy’s seascape ebbed and flowed with cool yet sensuous beauty.
Available on BBC Sounds until 19 August next year. The BBC Proms continue until 10 September.
