Singing Day: Ethel Smyth Mass in D

St Georges Singers, Poynton

Born in 1858, at the height of the Victorian age, Ethel Smyth fought against the societal restrictions that prevented women from having a profession. She was the first woman composer to have an opera performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and was heavily involved in the Suffragette movement, which adopted her song The March of the Women as its anthem, and which Thomas Beecham saw her conducting with her toothbrush from the window of Holloway Prison!

But it is Smyth’s glorious music rather than her activism that we celebrate in our 2024 Singing Day. Internationally recognised in her day, but almost forgotten since her death in 1944, Smyth’s body of work includes orchestral and chamber music, operas and librettos, concertos, keyboard works, choral and vocal pieces.

Her Mass in D was performed at the BBC Proms in 2022, the first time since Smyth’s own lifetime, and was described as ‘one of the crowning glories of the British choral tradition’. If you have never heard or sung this work before, please come and join us for a day of exciting musical discovery.