BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo ETHEL SMYTH Mass in D - Overture to "The Wreckers"

Ethel Smyth was one of England’s foremost Victorian composers, and a prominent suffragette. She was the first female composer to be honoured with a Damehood. She studied composition with Carl Reineke in Leipzig (alongside Dvorák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky) and then privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg (who introduced her to Brahms and Clara Schumann). Her Mass in D is her only large-scale religious work, although it was certainly composed for the concert hall rather than the church. Scored for 4 soloists, choir, and orchestra, the Mass in D sets the usual six parts of the mass, but is performed with the Gloria at the end, not second, at the instruction of the composer. Her opera The Wreckers, set in mid-eighteenth-century Cornwall, is considered by some critics to be the ‘most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten’. The Overture sets the scene wonderfully, as well as introducing the main thematic material to follow. Sakari Oramo and his BBC forces are joined by an outstanding quartet of soloists for this Surround Sound recording.

BBC Singers / The Norwegian Wind Ensemble / David Hill G.F. HANDEL Messiah

The BBC Singers and conductor David Hill join with one of the world´s oldest continuously running orchestras, The Norwegian Wind Ensemble (NWE), to present this major new arrangement of George Frideric Handel’s most celebrated oratorio – Messiah HWV 56.

Arranged for wind ensemble by NWE member Stian Aareskjold, this version here receives its world premere recording with a stellar cast of soloists who bring this visionary re-scoring of this famous work vividly to life.