SMYTH: String Quintet in E, Op. 1 (1884) / Fanny Mendelssohn Qrt; Johanna Varner, cel 2 / Moods of the Sea [Meerestille] / Maartens Koningsberger, bar; Kelvin Grout, pno / Piano Trio (1880): I. Allegro non troppo; II. ‘Der Mutte [sic] der Einfachkeit [sic] ?!’ III. Scherzo: Presto con brio; IV. Finale: Allegro vivace / Neave Trio / available for free streaming on YouTube by clicking links above
I’ve reached a point in my reviewing life where I tend to distrust and sometimes dismiss entire albums put out by various musicians when I discover that at least half of the music on them turns me off, but am still drawn to the stronger pieces on them, thus this is not the first (but probably the first in a long time) group of pieces by a single composer but NOT by a single group of musicians that I have chosen to review in lieu of whatever mismatched album of crap they’re currently pushing.
In this case, it was an album by the Boulanger Trio titled Who’s Afraid Of… which included several pieces by women composers. At least half of the music on it, to my ears, was pretty much lightweight or rubbishy, but the few substantive pieces I tracked down to other groups, and Lili Boulanger’s music, which I’ve always admired, was duplicated on an album on Chandos by the Neave Trio. But that album, too contained pieces that I felt to be drippy and unsubstantial by the vastly overrated composers Germaine Tailleferre and Cecile Chaminade.
To make this (unfortunately) long and roundabout story short, what caught my ear was a piece by Ethel Smyth I had never heard before, her early Piano Trio of 1880. She was only 22 years old when she wrote it and apparently didn’t think enough of it to assign an opus number. As you can see in the above header, she did assign Op. 1 to her String Quintet of four years later, another work that is seldom recorded and, like 99% of Smyth’s music, never performed in concerts. Over the last few years, I have revised my status of Smyth as the greatest female composer of the late 19th century to second-greatest, but only because the music if Emilie Luise Mayer is not only stronger but includes some excellent symphonies, one form that Ethel never attempted, but make no mistake, Smyth is still one of my feminist heroines in the music world.
Some of the online comments you will see at the YouTube sites containing these works make some pithy comments, particularly that the string writing in the quintet is not very good. Perhaps not when compared to the most brilliant and complex music of her time, but surely good enough for what she was trying to convey in this work. Sometimes I get so frustrated reading criticisms of the works of women composers when the men have their faults as well, particularly Brahms whose music was often over-studied and lacking spontaneity and imagination. Ethel Smyth’s music had those traits in abundance, and she does so here.
Now, mind you, the Smyth String Quintet is not, as I alluded to above, the most scintillating or brilliant piece of its kind, but like most of her music it is emotionally effective, and I, for one, appreciate its uncluttered scoring. One could say that this quintet is a symphony in reduction; the way she uses and develops her themes, sometimes with fairly busy counter-figures played against the top line and sometimes with very sparse accompaniment, sounds to be closer to a symphonic approach than a chamber music one, but you can say the same thing about the Schubert String Quintet in C, which is considered a masterpiece. Sometimes there is a great benefit to not clutter your work up with too many distracting figures and subsidiary ideas, and this is one such case. As for the performance, it is both energetic and musically sensitive. I owned a few of these Troubadisc CDs of Smyth’s music when they first emerged in the 1980s/early ‘90s and always like the performances. What I didn’t care for was the sound which, like this performance, tended to be very tight, unresonant and somewhat shrill. I found that by boosting the mid-range by 4 db and the bass by 2 db, you can achieve a much more pleasing (and, to my ears, more natural) sound balance.
Yes, there are a few moments when Smyth seemed to run out of ideas as to how she should best develop her music. The ending of the first movement, I admit, is a bit of a disappointment; instead of coming up with a really creative (and possibly polyphonic) ending, the movement just sort of plods across the finish line, but such moments are rare. Were some enterprising composer willing to score this quintet for a full orchestra, using lower instruments not in use here (basses, perhaps tubas or sarrusaphones, tympani, bass trombones, etc.) as well as the usual complement of winds and brass to fill in elsewhere (think of what Arnold Schoenberg did for that Brahms Piano Quartet), I think it would be a very satisfying piece to listen to.
One difference that I’ve noticed between Smyth and Mayer is that, possibly because of her British countryside upbringing, the former always enjoyed writing themes that resembled English folk music, which is almost always pleasant but rarely the kind of music that lends itself to drama as well as Eastern European folk music—but to be honest, German folk music is also generally too jolly to make dramatically effective themes, yet no one picks on Brahms for often writing pieces based on such music. No, it’s Ethel they go after, because she was the quintessential outsider in so many ways that, had she not had a will of iron and the stubbornness of a mule, would probably have buckled under to the pressure and written “women’s music” as drippy as that of Any Beach and her contemporaries. Remember how the two Louises, Farrenc and Bertin, were forced to cave in to peer pressure in their music. Ethel wanted no truck with that. You either took her on her own merits or you looked elsewhere.
In between the two chamber works, I’ve included a brief song cycle from 1913, Meerestille or Moods of the Sea, set to poems by Arthur Symons—again, a typically British subject that fascinated composers from Vaughan Williams to Britten. This is music of great subtlety, even different from the vocal music she wrote for her most famous opera, The Wreckers. In this performance, Dutch baritone Maartens Koningsberger sings the second song, “Before the Squall,” a full tone lower than written because it didn’t suit his vocal range. This is certainly permissible, but by tinkering with the recording I noticed that it sounds pretty good if raised a half-tone and does not distort Koningsberger’s voice, so you may want to raise the pitch on that song yourself. In any case, they are very fine songs in their genre and should certainly be performed in concert now and then…but of course they won’t. Koningsberger does his best to enunciate the words clearly, and if you listen through headphones you’ll be able to make them out fairly well, but being a non-native speaker of English he has a few problems. The piano accompaniment is colorful but not highly virtuosic—again, emotionally and musically effective without trying to do too much.
Here are the lyrics for you to follow while listening:
- Requies
O is it death or life that sounds
Like something strangely known
In this subsiding out of strife,
This low sea monotone?
A sound scarce heard through sleep
Murmurs as the August bees
That fill the forest hollows deep
About the roots of trees.
O is it death or life, or is it
Hope or memory
That quiets all things with this breath
Of the eternal sea?
- Before the squall
The wind is rising on the sea,
The windy white foam-dancers leap;
And the sea moans uneasily,
And turns to sleep, and cannot sleep.
Ridge after rocky ridge uplifts,
Wild hands, and hammers at the land,
Scatters in liquid dust, and drifts
To death among the dusty sand.
On the horizon’s nearing line,
Where the sky rests, a visible wall,
Grey in the offing, I divine,
The sails that fly before the squall.
- After sunset
The sea lies quieted beneath
The after-sunset flush
That leaves upon the heaped grey clouds
The grape’s faint purple blush.
Pale, from a little space in heaven
Of delicate ivory,
The sickle-moon and one gold star
Look down upon the sea.
We wrap up our latest survey of Smyth’s music with the very early Piano Trio. I can see why she shelved it without an opus number: it vacillates between broad, sweeping Romantic melodies and very dramatic passages, but in retrospect the final result really isn’t bad at all and she wrote some really effective music for the piano in this work. If one wishes to nitpick, I’d say that the cello part is probably the least interesting of the three. Mind you, it’s not bad, it’s just not terribly strong and, in places, seemed to me to be just filling space, but in other passages Smyth wrote some good music for it to contribute to the tripartite development of her themes. Perhaps the Neave Trio gives it a little too much lyricism in places, but by comparison with the only other recording of it that I found online, they at least play all fo the music with vigor and emotional commitment, and that in itself makes this the preferred recording.
The second (slow) movement, which bears the strange title ‘Der Mutte [sic] der Einfachkeit [sic] ?!’ or “The Mother (sic) of Simplicity (sic)?!,” is perhaps the strangest. As in the case of many slow movements in Romantic music, Smyth interjects a faster, more dramatic middle section, but in her case she returns to the stronger music so often that it almost seems to be two movement in one. I like it because it’s different, but I can see where more conventional-minded listeners would take some time getting used to it. Her third-movement “Scherzo: Presto con brio” starts out double time as almost a 12/8 theme, played in an edgy, nervous manner, but not with a malevolent feeling. On the contrary, despite being in the minor, it is almost consistently jolly-sounding. And I’m happy to say that the Neave Trio fully understands its quirks and tempo changes, managing to make this movement sound organic rather than episodic, a challenge overcome.
In some ways, the last movement is the best of all, sounding for all the world like first-rate Brahms or Mendelssohn, and I defy anyone listening to it to say otherwise. Where is there any flaw in theme choice, tempo shifts or development? Nowhere. Despite its changes of pace and mood, it is a fully organic work of great integrity. Even the occasional (and quite surprising) double-time, jolly figures that crop up seem more an expression of the composer’s own joy in finding an outlet for her musical expression. It is, in its own way, as complete an aural picture of Ethel Smyth’s inner being as one could possibly hope to expect and, again, the Neave Trio understands and conveys all of this.
I am acquainted with several folks who don’t take Ethel Smyth seriously at all as a composer. That’s their problem. I’m tired of arguing with closed minds. I give this review, then, to open minded readers, and don’t much care what the others think.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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