Celebrating Ethel Smyth

The London Oriana Choir recently organised a concert at Southwark Cathedral featuring Ethel Smyth's Mass in D alongside Bach's B Minor Mass. Ethel Smyth was a remarkable woman - a composer, author, suffragette, sports enthusiast, friend of Tchaikovsky and Brahms, the first female composer to be awarded a damehood, the first woman composer to have an opera performed at Covent Garden and New York's Metropolitan Opera, a pioneer both in and out of the concert hall. The photo shows the Choir's musical director Dominic Ellis-Peckham with Dr Christopher Wiley from the University of Surrey, an internationally-renowned expert on Ethel Smyth who gave a pre-concert talk, and Lucy Stevens, who portrayed Ethel Smyth in the show Grasp the Nettle on the her life.