August 18th marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting women in the US the right to vote. A fitting time then for our release of the World Premier Recording of Ethel Smyths late masterpiece The Prison. Smyth left home at nineteen to study composition in Leipzig. In the company of Clara Schumann and her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, she met and won the admiration of composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvorák, and Grieg. Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Met, in 1903. (The second was Kaija Saariaho, whose L'Amour de loin appeared there in 2016!) Smyth later became central to the Suffragette movement in England, writing the March of the Women. Her gender politics and sexuality were cause for attacks by critics, and she famously went to prison herself for throwing a stone through an MPs window. Composed in 1930 and premiered in 1931 in Edinburghs Usher Hall, The Prison is a Symphony in two parts, Close on Freedom and The Deliverance, set for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, chorus, and full orchestra. The text is taken from a philosophical work by Henry Bennet Brewster and concerns the writings of a prisoner in solitary confinement, his reflections on life and his preparations for death. The album is recorded in Surround Sound and available as a Hybrid SACD.

Choir & Organ September/October 2020
    Smyth was much influenced by neo-Platonism and appended a line from Plotinus to The Prison, suggesting that music was a means to releasing the divine in us, Soloists and chorus convey that very well, sustaining a tension between physicality and spirit that gives the recording an almost Mahlerian quality.

Presto Classical July 2020
    Burton is an eloquent and affecting Prisoner, his dark night of the soul rooted in existential dread…His dialogues with Sarah Brailey’s luminous Soul have an almost Hollywood-esque quality (no debt to Elgar’s Gerontius here), and Smyth’s evocation of dawn via avian woodwinds is just one example of her brilliance as an orchestrator here.
Katherine Cooper

The Guardian 6th August 2020
    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.