By Aaron Keebaugh

Given its considerable strength and vitality, Ethel Smyth’s music deserves its newfound place in the limelight. Let’s hope the BSO programs more of her music again soon.

Andris Nelsons conducts the Bruch Violin Concerto with violinist Randall Goosby and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Photo: Robert Torres

“Better late than never,” scholars of Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) have told me recently.

They were referring to recent interest in the music of this singular British composer and suffragette, whose work has been receiving a a host of new performances and recordings over the past several years.

Still, for all of the renewed attention, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and conductor Andris Nelsons have lagged behind the times. This past weekend, they performed the overture to Smyth’s opera The Wreckers — the first of any of her orchestral pieces to be played in BSO history. Yes, the composition was paid token service in a program of Max Bruch and Felix Mendelssohn, but the outing at least signals the beginning of some long overdue enthusiasm: Smyth’s music may be finally getting its due in Boston.

This is a composer whose life was as interesting as her artistic output, but it has taken nearly a century for Smyth’s music to see the light of day anywhere. Her operas were once the talk of London and continental Europe. For example, Der Wald, with its deep Wagnerian hues, was staged at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903. And, like that opera, her other works earnestly wrestle with difficult subjects. Her choral symphony, The Prison, for one, revolves around a personal struggle for peace as a prisoner comes to terms with his imminent death. Smyth was writing from experience — she served a stint in jail for hurling a brick at a Parliament window during a suffragette riot. If there’s a message to be taken from her art, it is one that resonates with a gradual acceptance of things as they are.

The Wreckers remains Smyth’s best work. A story of pirates and a nearby religious community, the opera explores the perils of populist hysteria before Britten’s Peter Grimes. All the music’s wayward, conflicted tensions are displayed in microcosm during the ten-minute overture. On Saturday, the BSO captured fierce urgency and impish humor as Nelsons adroitly shaping Smyth’s piece in bold colors. The strings sang vibrantly, the woodwinds played with assurance. The brass chorale central to the score lingered with appropriate power, generating palpable gravitas.

Given its considerable strength and vitality, Smyth’s music deserves its newfound place in the limelight. Let’s hope the BSO programs more of her music again soon.

The evening’s other discovery was violinist Randall Goosby, who dispatched Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with lyrical resplendence and a keen sense of the music’s structural peaks and valleys. His technique is bold yet fluid, his tone weighty without a hint of any grain. If his style recalls that of Itzhak Pearlman, it’s because that great violinist served as Goosby’s mentor.

Considering that influence, Saturday revealed that Goosby has a distinctive flair for dramatic urgency without venturing into overstatement. In the first movement, his arpeggios and scale ebbed and flowed in huge waves. Yet the flourishes always served the larger structure; the phrases and their orchestral accompaniment were mixed in an ideal balance. That was most evident in the second movement, where Goosby and Nelsons traded figures that coiled in soft, vocal-like arcs.

The finale delivered the requisite fireworks, albeit by way of a rather deliberate tempo. Still, Goosby and Nelsons made a perfect team. The music bounded with a sure-footed flair that brought the audience to its feet. Goosby rewarded the applause with and encore of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Louisiana Blues Strut, rendered with down-home verve.

After intermission, Nelsons led Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5, Reformation, with just as much searing energy.

Nelsons’s  usual penchant for lingering indulgence might have worked for this score. But this time around he opted for punch and drive, his approach conveying a youthful vigor and bold affirmation that supplied its share of surprises. That said, he didn’t fail to relish the lyrical moments when appropriate. He shaped the slow introduction via grand statements — it was as much a reflection of religious fervor as Romantic excess. The third movement similarly sounded with pleasing hymnic warmth.

The rest of the performance was pure fire. The scherzo’s brisk tempo coursed zestfully. The finale, with its liberal quotation of the Lutheran hymn “Ein Feste Berg,” stepped along with valedictory swagger.

Illuminating details were spotlit along the way. Elizabeth Rowe’s velvety flute solo in the recitative offered momentary reflection. And that was a valuable reminder. Amid the exuberance of new musical discoveries, this performance suggested that sometimes it is nice to pause, relax, and just take in all the brilliance.

Aaron Keebaugh has been a classical music critic in Boston since 2012. His work has been featured in the Musical Times, Corymbus, Boston Classical Review, Early Music America, and BBC Radio 3. A musicologist, he teaches at North Shore Community College in both Danvers and Lynn.