Ethel Smyth's Mass in D

The BBC Symphony Chorus launches its 90th birthday season with a concert featuring Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D and Tchaikovsky’s heartfelt First Piano Concerto.

Admired by Adrian Boult and Thomas Beecham, and counting Tchaikovsky among her personal friends and supporters, composer-suffragette Ethel Smyth was a pioneer both in and out of the concert hall. Her Mass in D, fittingly performed in the centenary year of women’s suffrage, is a major work whose highlights include the blazing Sanctusand a delicately lovely Benedictus. It is paired with the heart-on-sleeve heroics of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto for which former BBC New Generation Artist Pavel Kolesnikov is the soloist, a young Russian pianist whose free-spirited energy and conviction is a natural fit for this repertoire.