Poor old Ethel Smyth. A fine composer, she had the misfortune to be a) English and b) a woman, both of which have condemned her to musical purgatory for much of the 70 years since her death. Still, Der Wald (never recorded) was the only opera by a woman to be staged at the Met until Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin in 2016.

The Boatswain’s Mate (1914) is a small-scale but quintessential English comic opera. The widow and publican Mrs Waters is wooed relentlessly by a retired boatswain. When he recruits an unemployed soldier to frighten her into thinking she needs protecting, matters are turned upside down, with unexpected results for Mrs Waters’ head and heart. Act I employs spoken dialogue, a device awkwardly dropped in Act II, and some sections go on far too long, but it’s a winning libretto set to highly attractive music and incorporates elements of folk and popular song – it even quotes Smyth’s suffragette anthem, The March of the Women, though the work really doesn’t own the feminist credentials that are sometimes claimed for it.

This world premiere is conducted by Odaline de la Martinez who directed the marvelous first recording of Smyth’s The Wreckers back in the 1990s. The reduced band is fine, the singers all acceptable (though the dialogue is rather poorly done). Only available direct from Retropect Opera, it’s well worth acquiring if you are a lover of musical comedy or of English music in general.

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