Ethel Smyth: Fête Galante

A Dance-Dream in One Act: Poetic version by Edward Shanks, after Maurice Baring’s story

Charmian Bedford (soprano), Carolyn Dobbin (mezzo), Felix Kemp (baritone), Simon Wallfisch (baritone), Mark Milhofer (tenor), Alessandro Fisher (tenor), Dame Felicity Lott (reciter), Valerie Langfield (piano)

Lontano Ensemble, Odaline de la Martinez

If you’ve never quite warmed to Ethel Smyth’s orchestral or choral music, here’s a disc that might just win you to her cause...It’s an ensemble piece in every sense, and under Odaline de la Martinez... — Gramophone Magazine, February 2020 More…

Release Date: 15th Nov 2019
Catalogue No: RO007
Label: Retrospect Opera

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Smyth: Fête galante

Charmian Bedford (soprano), Carolyn Dobbin (mezzo), Felix Kemp (baritone), Simon Wallfisch (baritone), Mark Milhofer (tenor), Alessandro Fisher (tenor)
Lontano Ensemble
Odaline de la Martinez

Lehmann, L: The Happy Prince

Dame Felicity Lott (reciter), Valerie Langfield (piano)

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This album brings together, for the first time, music by two of Britain’s leading female composers of the early twentieth century: Ethel Smyth and Liza Lehmann.

Smyth described her beautiful one-act opera of 1923, Fête Galante, as ‘A Dance-Dream’. It is a romantic evocation of the traditional commedia dell’arte – the world of Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine. In an idyllic Watteau-esque garden, we find love, jealousy, deception and danger as life mysteriously mimics art. Will Pierrot identify the Queen’s lover, or must he pay the ultimate price for silence?

Lehmann’s dramatic ‘recitation’, or melodrama, of 1908, The Happy Prince, is a musical retelling of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated story of self-sacrifice and redemption. Composed for reciter and pianist, this recording of Lehmann’s charming musical melodrama is an excellent insight into the rarely explored world of a form once extremely popular.

Special feature: Historic recordings of excerpts from Fête Galante, The Boatswain’s Mate, and Entente Cordiale performed by The Light Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

Reviews

February 2020

If you’ve never quite warmed to Ethel Smyth’s orchestral or choral music, here’s a disc that might just win you to her cause...It’s an ensemble piece in every sense, and under Odaline de la Martinez the singing of the cast is as light, lively and expressive as Lontano’s playing – perfectly weighted to the material, though Carolyn Dobbin’s Queen (sensuous as well as graceful) and Felix Kemp’s plangent, doomed Pierrot make a particular impression.

March 2020

The ambiguity of mood is sustained throughout, with the dark spirit of ‘dream’ looming as large as the light spirit of ‘dance’...Retrospect uses the leaner of Smyth’s two orchestral scores, which emphasizes the opera’s transparent economy, as well as allowing subtle expressivity in the formal choruses. These are beautifully managed here by Martinez, with a pared-down group of eight singers...Liza Lehmann’s melodrama of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince makes a gently pleasant filler.

Ethel Smyth: Fête Galante

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