This album brings together, for the first time, music by two of Britain’s leading female composers of the early twentieth century: Ethel Smyth and Liza Lehmann.

Smyth described her beautiful one-act opera of 1923, Fête Galante, as ‘A Dance-Dream’. It is a romantic evocation of the traditional commedia dell’arte – the world of Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine. In an idyllic Watteau-esque garden, we find love, jealousy, deception and danger as life mysteriously mimics art. Will Pierrot identify the Queen’s lover, or must he pay the ultimate price for silence?

Lehmann’s dramatic ‘recitation’, or melodrama, of 1908, The Happy Prince, is a musical retelling of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated story of self-sacrifice and redemption. Composed for reciter and pianist, this recording of Lehmann’s charming musical melodrama is an excellent insight into the rarely explored world of a form once extremely popular.