From Clarion: The Clarion Choir joins with Cathedral Choral Society and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to perform Dame Ethel Smyth's Mass in D at Washington National Cathedral. Ethel Smyth was a composer and suffragette at the turn of the 20th-century whose works were championed by many great musicians and conductors of the day, such as Arthur Sullivan and Thomas Beecham. Following her death, however, her works fell into relative obscurity. Smyth’s music is now enjoying a well-deserved Renaissance. And her Mass in D is a powerful and dramatic work, here receiving its first performance by a major American symphony orchestra.

Together with the Mass, the BSO and the combined choirs, under the direction of Steven Fox, will perform Mozart’s Meistermusik, a rarely-heard version of the Maurerische Trauermusik, in which the composer added a chant melody that may be sung above the orchestra.