Ethel Smyth - The Wreckers (Odaline de la Martinez)

Information

Composer: Ethel Smyth

• The Wreckers

Opera in three acts

Libretto by Henry Brewster

Anne-Marie Owens; Justin Lavender

Peter Sidhom; David Wilson-Johnson

Judith Howard; Anthony Roden

Brian Bannatyne-Scott; Annemarie Sand

Huddersfield Choral Society

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

Odaline de la Martinez, conductor

Date: 1994

Label: Conifer Classics

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review

This historic first recording of Ethel Smyth’s masterpiece The Wreckers derives from a meticulously prepared 1994 Henry Wood Promenade Concert, staged to mark the 50th anniversary of Dame Ethel’s death. Originally released by Conifer in studio-quality BBC sound, it returns in this finely annotated reissue on the fledgling Retrospect Opera label.

The timing will seem apt, given Smyth’s brief albeit rambunctious involvement with women’s suffrage. But Retrospect Opera’s interest is musical, not political. Its 2016 premiere recording of Smyth’s comic opera The Boatswain’s Mate (5/18) has recently acquired wider distribution and a premiere recording of her Fête galante is promised next year.

When Britten created Peter Grimes, a comparable piece to The Wreckers, he drew on George Crabbe’s narrative poem ‘The Borough’; Smyth, steeping herself in landscape and history, made her own scenario. Set in an impoverished fishing community in Cornwall in the 1780s, The Wreckers concerns (said Smyth) ‘the plundering of ships lured on to the rocks by the falsification or extinction of the coastal lights; the relentless murders of their crews; and, with it, all the ingrained religiosity of a Celtic population which, at the time, had become the scene of Wesley’s great religious revival’. When the pastor’s idealistic young wife Thirza and her lover expose the evil, they are condemned as subversives and adulterers, and immured in a sea-cave where they drown.

England in 1904, the year of the work’s completion, was not a ‘land without music’ but it was, creatively speaking, a ‘land without opera’. Little wonder, then, that The Wreckers was sired elsewhere and had the strangest of genealogies. Conceived in English but with a French libretto, it had its premiere, at Artur Nikisch’s instigation, in German in Leipzig in 1906. It finally reached London, in an English back-translation, when Beecham mounted a production at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1909. The following year he presented it at Covent Garden, where another of the opera’s admirers, Bruno Walter, shared the conducting.

Nikisch, Beecham, Walter: these were not negligible figures. Nor were these temporary enthusiasms. In a concert in Berlin in 1928, during which Dame Ethel became the first woman to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, Walter conducted the ‘Cliffs of Cornwall’ prelude and love music from Act 2, with Rose Pauly, a celebrated Elektra, as Thirza, and the great Swedish Wagnerian Carl-Martin Oeman as her lover Mark.

Beecham thought so highly of the piece he feared that ‘no Anglo-Saxon singer’ could rise to the challenge of the ‘splendid and original’ role of Thirza or catch ‘a tithe of the intensity and spiritual exaltation’ which Mark exudes. Well, Anne-Marie Owens and Justin Lavender come close in this 1994 performance, with powerful support from Peter Sidhom as Pascoe, the cuckolded pastor and village headman.

Smyth may have imagined The Wreckers as her Cornish Tristan but Der fliegende Holländer is the closer source musically. (The orchestral writing is especially fine, as the present performance eloquently confirms.) The role of Mark’s teenage admirer Avis (the admirable Judith Howarth) is an odd lapse: Bizet’s Micaëla garlanded with phrases lifted directly from Carmen herself. But that is by the by. The Wreckers is a music-drama which for the most part steers its own courageous course.

Like Graham Vick’s thrilling 1983 Warwick University production, this 1994 performance confirms its revivability. Meanwhile, how strategic was Britten’s silence on the subject? The Wreckers was staged at Covent Garden in 1931 and again at Sadler’s Wells in 1939: a lavishly praised production broadcast live by the BBC the week before Britten sailed for the United States on April 29.

-- Richard Osborne, Gramophone

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ethel Smyth (22 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Despite that her father was very much opposed to her making a career in music, Smyth was determined to become a composer, studied with a private tutor, and then attended the Leipzig Conservatory, where she met many composers of the day. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral and concertante works, choral works, and operas. Smyth was made a DBE in 1922, being the first female composer to be awarded a damehood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Smyth

***

Odaline de la Martinez (born 31 October 1949) is a Cuban-American composer and conductor, currently residing in the UK. She studied at Tulane University, New Orleans, and the Royal Academy of Music in London. Martinez is co-founder and artistic director of Lontano, a London-based contemporary music ensemble. In 1984 she became the first woman to conduct at a BBC Promenade Concert. As well as frequent appearances as a guest conductor with leading orchestras throughout Great Britain, she is also known as a broadcaster for BBC Radio and Television and has recorded extensively for several labels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaline_de_la_Martinez

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FLAC, tracks

Links in comment

Enjoy!