★★★★☆

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.

Glyndebourne’s recent revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and several German opera houses have taken it up. So what next?

Try the second piano sonata in C minor. Composed in 1877 in a flush of passion for an operetta singer, the sonata inhabits a patch midway between Schumann and Brahms but with a strong enough presence to express a spiky individuality. Smyth was 19 at the time, a student in Leipzig. The promise is there for all to hear. This is quite some sonata.

A set of variations in D major on “An Original Theme (of an Exceeding Dismal Nature)”, written a year later, tells us that Smyth took herself no more seriously than necessary. It’s a 20-minute suite of cocky facility that puts the likes of Grieg and Tchaikovsky (whom she knew) firmly in their place. Not dismal at all: more snarky and mocking of the stuffed male shirts around the dinner table.

The conviction here is blazed by pianist Hanni Liang, an academy teacher in Munich. Between and around the Smyth works, Liang performs four modernities, of which Sally Beamish’s Night Dances is brilliantly evocative. The other pieces, more quirky, are by Erollyn Wallen, Chen Yi and Eleanor Alberga. Not a dull phrase among them. 

The Delphian label, by the way, is an Edinburgh indy with a knack for the unexpected. You’d never hear a recital like this on Warner, Sony or the other classical codgers. Five stars for initiative. Review written, I’m re-listening now for pure pleasure.