Check out our new ALBUM OF THE WEEK!
This week's choice is very special - let's celebrate PRIDE MONTH together:
Mass in D Major & Overture to "the Wreckers",
by Ethel Smyth
Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was an English composer and member of the women's suffrage movement. She composed several pieces for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works, and operas.
She had several romantic relationships in her life, most of them with women and described her sexuality as an "Everlasting puzzle".
In recognition of her work and compositions, she was awarded a damehood - and she was the first female composer to win this honor.
We invite you to listen and share this album - because equality should be celebrated EVERYDAY!
Happy listening!
About the album:
Ethel Smyth was one of England’s foremost Victorian composers, and a prominent suffragette. She was the first female composer to be honoured with a Damehood. She studied composition with Carl Reineke in Leipzig (alongside Dvorák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky) and then privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg (who introduced her to Brahms and Clara Schumann). Her Mass in D is her only large-scale religious work, although it was certainly composed for the concert hall rather than the church. Scored for 4 soloists, choir, and orchestra, the Mass in D sets the usual six parts of the mass, but is performed with the Gloria at the end, not second, at the instruction of the composer. Her opera The Wreckers, set in mid-eighteenth-century Cornwall, is considered by some critics to be the ‘most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten’. The Overture sets the scene wonderfully, as well as introducing the main thematic material to follow.
Source: High Res Audio
Source: High Res Audio
JUNE 24
Born 24 June
More about her
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