Smyth Concerto for Violin and Horn

 Day 42

Smyth Concerto for violin horn and orchestra 

Elena Urioste violin

Alex Frank-Gemmill horn

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Daniel Blendulf

I’ve noted before that the repertoire of music by women composers is starting to open up. But it was not that long ago that this music was almost wholly unknown. If I had asked my mother, a keen music lover, to name a female composer I am pretty sure that the only name she would have come up with was Dame (and it always was Dame!) Ethyl Smyth. This was not because of any knowledge of her music but because she had established a reputation as one of those grand eccentric upper class women. Her main claim to fame was through her connection with the Suffragette movement. She wrote the unofficial hymn of the movement - the song of the women ‘Shout, Shout, up with your song’,which many will remember being used as the theme tune for the BBC series Shoulder to Shoulder

This concerto is a comparatively late work (1927) - it has a kept a tenuous place in the literature because of the effect in the last movement where the solo horn is required to play chords, by humming at the same time as playing. To be honest the effect didn’t come over very strongly on this recording - perhaps you need to see it being done live.

I’d love to say that this was a forgotten masterpiece but frankly I found it very disappointing. It seemed to me to ramble on without much shape and there was little to really catch the imagination. The combination of horn and violin as solo instruments is certainly usual but I didn’t think that Smyth had really worked out what she was going to do with them or how to spark them  off against each other. The middle movement ‘Elegy in Memoriam’ did have some attractive moments but again I am not really sure that it did enough to retain the attention throughout. 

This was the first piece of Ethyl Smyth that that I have head (I may have encountered the overture to The Wreckers years ago but I don’t remember it if I did) and unfortunately  nothing here has led me to want to explore more of her work. But some people do speak very highly of her and perhaps I need to give her music another chance.