From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch lesbian from an English military family who went to jail for the Suffragette cause and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Prison with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and other wary admirers. Virginia Woolf once said that being loved by Ethel was “like being caught by a giant crab”. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded whatever merit there was in her music, which faded out with her death in 1944….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
In The Critic.
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