Composer Ethel Smyth has been scythed down over the years but now finally she is being taken seriously. A stickler in some matters, Smyth was subversive in others. In her Mass in D, originally conceived in 1891, she chose to have the Gloria close the sequence of movements, and conducted it that way in the 1928 Three Choirs festival.

Ninety years on, artistic director Geraint Bowen’s performance with the Festival chorus and orchestra-in-residence, Philharmonia, honoured Smyth’s intention of a glorious culminating finale, with its momentary references to Beethoven’s Ninth and the affirming joy of D major.

Division of the text and word-setting is unconventional, the word Crucifixus repeated over and over, passed through the choral voices as though beads on a rosary. Overall scoring is similarly unusual and, in the Agnus Dei, the mezzo-soprano combined with horns and tuba to create a mellow richness. Soloists Eleanor Dennis, Madeleine Shaw, Paul Nilon and Neal Davies reflected well the often operatic style, a reminder that Mahler planned to stage an opera of hers in Vienna.

While complemented here by John Ireland’s These Things Shall Be, Smyth’s Mass had given Geraint Bowen his starting point for a whole festival celebrating women and, in an earlier afternoon recital, Trio Dali played trios by Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger and Rebecca Clarke. The music’s indisputable eloquence made the prejudice of centuries all the more unfathomable.

• Three Choirs festival is at Hereford Cathedral until 4 August.