Ethel Smyth was unusual among composers in being able to write a work called The Prison from a position of experience, but her weeks in Holloway as a time-serving suffragette were long past by 1930, when, aged 72 and increasingly deaf, she finished this “symphony for soprano, bass-baritone, chorus and orchestra”. The words are by HB Brewster, who had been Smyth’s close friend and, perhaps, her lover; they take the form of a dialogue between an innocent prisoner awaiting execution and his soul, sung by a soprano, who is able to guide him towards spiritual peace.
This is its first recording, long overdue. The obvious comparison is with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, written three decades earlier, and indeed, there’s the hint of an Elgarian accent to Smyth’s music here, built on grounding bass notes and with subtly coloured, mercurial detail on top – but Smyth takes things in different directions. There is much that is striking, from the way in which Smyth draws in the scene around the prisoner’s voice at the very start, to the hint of a solemn Bach chorus at the end of the first half, and the echoing Last Post honouring the moment of death. It sounds clunky today, but would have made sense in the 1930s, especially to Smyth, who as the child of a major-general, had grown up next to a barracks. Most haunting of all is the beginning of the second half, the soprano soaring on one unchanging note while the music shifts and searches for stability underneath.
Brewster’s text is essentially a long discussion of metaphysics and, as a result, The Prison as a whole perhaps suffers from a sameness of pace. Still, James Blachly, conducting New York’s Experiential Chorus and Orchestra, catches the music’s sweeping, sonorous energy. Sarah Brailey’s soprano radiates assurance, and Dashon Burton is outstanding as the pensive Prisoner.
This week’s other pick
In the Tavern of Sweet Songs is the debut CD from the composer David Lewiston Sharpe, an hour-long song cycle based on a 14th-century Sufi text. Taking alternate songs, the soprano Lucy Knight and tenor Jeff Stewart weave melodious vocal lines above Nigel Foster’s piano playing, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes piquant. Like Smyth’s work, these songs create atmosphere rather than a sense of action, and the pace doesn’t vary greatly – but the music takes its space from the beautifully evocative words, and the singers put them across with crystal clarity.
