Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Björk: Vespertine; Smyth: Mass in D

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

International Earth Day comes later this week, so with pressing environmental issues in mind I present Björk's Vespertine, a "A Pop Album as An Opera" (2018), based on the Icelandic singer/songwriter's Vespertine album from 2001 in a musical stage adaptation and arrangement, with additional music from the "Himmelfahrt Scores."

Vespertine, the opera, is a twenty-first century handling of the Gaia myth, the story of Gaia the Earth Mother handed down to us from the ancient Greek poet, Hesiod. The Earth dies, and a solitary scientist researches the future of life on Earth in a lifeless landscape of stones. Is it really the end of the world as we used to know it?

This environmental apocalypse of a lyric theaterwork was first staged by the Nationaltheater Mannheim (NTM) in Germany, who co-produced this work with the Danish Hotel Pro Forma artist group. The NTM production has four vocal soloists. The NTM Children's Choir portrays the stones. The NTM Women's Choir portrays the landscape, all the singers backed by the NTM Orchestra. For Björk Guðmundsdóttir (b. 1965) her Vespertine opera marks her transition from goth rock/electronica musician to full-fledged classical composer.

To fill out the afternoon's program I include the magnum opus of an eminent female composer of an earlier period, Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944). She was also a passionate feminist, famous in her time as the composer of The March of the Women, which became the battle hymn of the British suffragist movement. She even went to jail for the cause! She wrote several operas, but her monumental Mass in D (1891) is really what she should be remembered for in music history. It's modelled along the lines of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Despite the patronizing attitude of male music critics towards her as a "lady composer" in Victorian England, her work stands today very much on its own merits. Dame Ethel Smyth's Mass in D got the recording it richly deserved from the Plymouth Festival Chorus and Orchestra of Minneapolis under the direction of Philip Brunelle. A Virgin Classics CD release I last broadcast on Sunday, September 15, 1991. Björk's Vespertine was released on an Oehms Classics CD in 2019.