Ethel Smyth -Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra (1927)

Ethel Smyth in 1922

 

(22 April 1858 – 8 May 1944)

was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement.

 

Ethel Smyth: Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra (1927)

I. Allegro moderato
II. Elegy
III. Finale

--- cover image by Claude Monet ----

 

[Dame Ethel Smyth wrote her Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra with Aubrey Brain in mind.

He and Jelly d'Arányi premiered the work under Sir Henry Wood on 5 March 1927.

He also played it in Berlin with Marjorie Hayward.]

 

00:01 1.Allegro moderato 09:15

2.Elegy (in memoriam): Adagio 15:13

3.Finale: Allegro

Kateryna Timokhina violin

Konstantin Timokhine horn

Orchestra Society of Zurich (Orchestergesellschaft Zürich) André Fischer conductor

Live Concert on 20.November 2016 from Zurich

 

Ethel Smyth was a twentieth-century British composer and a champion of women's rights and female musicians. During her lifetime, she composed symphonies, choral works (musical pieces written for a choir), and operas including The Wreckers,1906, and is most well known for The March of Women, an anthem for the women's suffrage movement. In 1922, she was named a Dame of the British Empire.
She studied composition and theory at Leipzig Conservatory, where her sophisticated music elicited rave reviews. In 1889, she returned to London and developed talents in multiple areas of composition, culminating in an oeuvre that included orchestral pieces, choral arrangements, chamber music, and six operas. She earned acclaim for her performance of Mass in D, which was enthusiastically received in London in 1893.
The enduring mental picture of Ethel Smyth was evoked by the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.
Visiting her in Holloway Prison in 1912, he found the inmates marching and singing in the courtyard while Ethel "beat time in almost Bacchic frenzy with a toothbrush".
Smyth was a woman of formidable character. Whatever she did, whether composing music, writing books, falling in love or allying herself with the suffragette movement, she did with unstoppable passion, but her colourful life and reputation have tended to overshadow the thing she cared about most - her music. Smyth had been sent to jail after lobbing a rock through the window of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lewis Harcourt, who had made a condescending remark about women. Smyth had earnestly embraced the Votes for Women cause. She was a friend of Mrs Pankhurst, and wrote the March of the Women, which became the suffragettes' rallying cry.
Characteristically, she enjoyed the trial, and the magistrate seems scarcely to have got a word in edgeways, a factor that perhaps worked to her disadvantage not just in court but in her dealings with the musical world as well.
As a composer, she moved in all the right circles. She met Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Grieg in Leipzig, where she had gone to study. She attracted influential patrons such as the Empress Eugénie and the Princesse Edmond de Polignac. The female attachments she formed throughout her life were either with women of secure social standing or with writers of renown such as Edith Somerville and Virginia Woolf.
But Smyth had the knack of getting people's backs up. After much string-pulling, her opera The Wreckers was produced in Leipzig in 1906, but she was so incensed that the third act had been tampered with that she returned to the opera house after the premiere and commandeered the score and orchestral parts. She was also in the habit of sneaking into orchestra pits and pinning amendments to the musicians' desks, so that nobody, least of all the conductor, knew precisely what to play.
She could be maddening, but she was taken seriously as a composer by critics and public alike. In her lifetime, her music was performed in Germany and increasingly in England.