Bedford: My Mother, My Sister and I.
Stephanie Barron, soprano; Mary Wiegold, soprano; Evelyn Tubb, soprano; David Bedford, conductor.
Virgin Classics VC 7 59311 2. Recorded [dates and venue not provided]. CD.
I confess I came to David Bedford’s My Mother, My Sister and I with considerable curiosity—and left it with equally considerable ambivalence. Here is a work that tackles the fractured Pankhurst legacy with genuine dramatic intelligence, only to hobble itself with questionable production choices that feel less like aesthetic decisions than budgetary compromises.
The piece itself? Dramatically astute. Bedford and librettist Allison Powell have bypassed the easy triumphalism of suffragette hagiography to explore something far more interesting: the ideological rifts that splintered Emmeline Pankhurst from her daughters, particularly Sylvia. The opening “March of the W.S.P.U.” establishes the unity—all three sopranos blazing away in unison fervor—before Powell’s text begins its subtle work. Listen carefully to Sylvia‘s lines here, sung by Evelyn Tubb with a slight reserve that already hints at divergence. Where Christabel (Mary Wiegold) pledges herself to The Cause with capital letters, Sylvia speaks of “justice” in more universal terms. It is deft dramaturgy.
“Sylvia Visits Christabel in Paris” sharpens the blade. Bedford contrasts a giddy Parisian waltz—Christabel safely ensconced in exile, leading from a dress shop—with Sylvia‘s operatic recitative, all righteous London indignation. The materials should not fit together, yet they do, like antagonists circling each other. When those violent chords burst in, solemnizing the march theme (Bedford’s leitmotif for The Cause), we are thrust into the “Lament for the Martyrs.” This is compelling stuff: the catalog of sufferings, the force-feeding, the brutal prison conditions. The list ends pointedly with Emmeline and Sylvia. No Christabel.
The “Letter Trio” exposes the class divide beneath the gender politics. Emmeline and Christabel name their targets—influential dignitaries, the establishment—while Sylvia sings desperately of the poor. Bedford sets this as patter song against lyric outpouring, and suddenly we understand: this is not just about tactics, it is Right versus Left. The outbreak of war completes the rupture. Emmeline and Christabel turn jingoist; Sylvia recoils.
Which brings us to “Sylvia Looks Back on the Past,” and here Bedford reaches for something like the emotional territory of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde—that sense of infinite regret, the long goodbye. “Something so good should never end” repeats and repeats, fading into distance. The effect should be devastating.
But—and here is where my ambivalence hardens into frustration—the synthesized accompaniment undermines everything. Bedford speaks of creating an “orchestra” evoking Salvation Army bands, brass ensembles, music hall. What we actually get sounds like a church organ console and a drum machine. The Paris waltz manages some trumpety plausibility; the rest is unconvincing. Why not hire actual musicians? Bedford surely knows enough brass players to assemble a small ensemble. The anachronism of synthesizers in a period piece is defensible if the sounds convince, but these do not.
Worse still is that final fade. Where Mahler achieves his effect through orchestral wizardry—instruments dropping away, harmonics lingering in actual acoustic space—Bedford gives us an electronic fade-out, the sonic equivalent of turning down a volume knob. We are left not in an empty room but a blank one. The difference matters enormously.
The three sopranos navigate these obstacles with considerable skill. Barron brings appropriate matriarchal authority to Emmeline, Wiegold captures Christabel’s steely determination, and Tubb invests Sylvia with genuine pathos. My one reservation: in those closing repetitions, Tubb adds melismatic ornaments—little pop-diva yodels—that interrupt the hypnotic effect Bedford clearly intended. And Powell’s phrase “never end” creates an awkward elision that sounds like “neve-Rend,” which no singer can quite finesse.
The recording itself is functional but flat. The voices project clearly enough, but there is no acoustic space around them, no sense of performers in a room. Everything sounds piped directly from mixing desk to your speakers.
Twenty-six minutes for full price? That is thin value by any measure. Which leads me to my final assessment: My Mother, My Sister and I deserves better than it has received here. The compositional thinking is first-rate, the dramatic architecture sound, the vocal writing effective. But the execution—that synthesized accompaniment, that airless recording, that stingy running time—suggests a project that could not quite secure the resources it needed. One imagines this piece with a proper chamber ensemble, recorded in an actual hall, paired with something substantial to fill out the disc. That would be worth hearing. This version, for all its musical intelligence, sounds like a very good demo tape.
Bedford has written something genuinely worthwhile. Someone needs to record it properly.
