Concert 3: Ethel Smyth and the Suffragettes - Friday 31st October, 7pm
Ella Taylor - soprano
Lotte Betts-Dean - mezzo-soprano
Nigel Foster - piano

Ethel Smyth was truly a pioneer, the first woman composer to have a work premiered at the Met in New York (and the only woman composer to be performed there until 2016) and the first female composer to receive a damehood. She also played a prominent role in the Suffragette movement, for which she was imprisoned in 1912, and she composed the March of the Women which became the Suffragette anthem. This programme, devised by Nigel Foster, uses Smyth’s own words from her Memoirs to explore the part she played in the Suffragette movement, campaigning for women’s’ right to vote, and to depict her same-sex relationships, her ‘Passions’, as she called them, which are illustrated by songs, all settings of poems written by women, by Amy Beach, Muriel Herbert, Samuel Barber, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Charles Ives, Liza Lehmann, Tania Leon, Frank Bridge, Elgar and others, and several songs by Ethel herself are also included in the mix.

Ella Taylor is a non-binary soprano. They were a Young Artist at the National Opera Studio and have since sung leading roles for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, English National Opera, Dutch National Opera, Opera North, and at the Staatsoper Hamburg, with the Philharmonia and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestras, and the London Sinfonietta, and at the Oxford International Song Festival and Leeds Lieder.
Lotte Betts-Dean is a regular favourite at LSF concerts. She won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award 2024 and is a former Young Artist of the Oxford Lieder Festival (now Oxford International Song Festival). She has sung at the Aldeburgh Festival, Lewes Festival of Song, Wigmore Hall, leading roles for Opera Holland Park, the Grand Théâtre Genève, the Bayerische Staatsoper, and the Sydney Opera House.
Nigel Foster has performed at Wigmore Hall, the South Bank Centre, Barbican Centre, Royal Opera House Covent Garden (Crush Bar) and across Europe as well as in North and South America, Japan, Malaysia and New Zealand, playing for singers including Roderick Williams, Dame Sarah Connolly, Nicky Spence, Nadine Benjamin, Kate Royal, Lotte Betts-Dean, James Gilchrist, Julien Van Mellaerts, Ashley Riches, Simon Wallfisch, Louise Winter, and Elizabeth Llewellyn.