Smyth / Brailey / Blachly Prison Super-Audio CD

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 Smyth's 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, Dvork, 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 MP's window. Composed in 1930 and premiered in 1931 in Edinburgh's 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.

1. Part I, Close on Freedom: I awoke in the middle of the night 2. Part I, Close on Freedom: We are full of immortality 3. Part I, Close on Freedom: I was alone with the sorrow 4. Part I, Close on Freedom: There is no secret 5. Part I, Close on Freedom: Will it return to me with the same face 6. Part I: The Voices reply: Others are elsewhere, under other names 7. Part I, Close on Freedom: Orchestral Interlude: The first glimmer of Dawn 8. Part I, Close on Freedom: In the faint grey morning I hear 9. Part II, The Deliverance: Chorale Prelude in the Prison Chapel 10. Part II, The Deliverance: The struggle is over; the time has come 11. Part II, The Deliverance: I hear them overhead moving to depart 12. Part II, The Deliverance: Pastorale: Sunset calm 13. Part II, The Deliverance: I disband myself 14. Part II, The Deliverance: The laughter we have laughed 15. Part II, The Deliverance: For years you have been conning your lesson 16. Part II, The Deliverance: This is no leavetaking