Ruth Gipps: first broadcast of Symphony No. 1

Somehow it escaped my attention last month that Ruth Gipps’ First Symphony (op. 22) received its first radio broadcast on 22nd February (two days after the 101st anniversary of Gipps’ birth and the day before the twenty-fifth of her death).  The broadcast, which was the centrepiece of BBC Radio 3’s Afternoon Concert, was a recording of a performance given at Salford in September last year by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Rumon Gamba.

I have long been curious to hear this work, as it is the only Gipps symphony for which no recording, however thin or scratchy, seemed to exist.  Nobody seemed to discuss it much either, and it even crossed my mind that it might have been suppressed or lost.  The lack of recording is scarcely surprising, it turns out, as September’s was its first performance since its 1940s première.  Judging by a single hearing, I found it a hugely enjoyable, fresh, joyful work, already (the composer having written it at the age of twenty-one) with that brightness and sparkiness which is so characteristic of Gipps, and elsewhere offset by a more pensive lyricism.  Some might sneer that at certain moments the influence of her teacher Ralph Vaughan Williams is too obviously audible – but in my view that is no bad thing, and even if Gipps herself openly rejected the cult of originality in music (‘my music is a direct follow-on from that of Vaughan Williams, Bliss and Walton’), the symphony struck me me as distinctively and characteristically hers.  Vaughan Williams may well have influenced the work, but he could not have written it.  It has all her hallmarks.

It can be listened to here at around the one-hour mark, unfortunately only until 5 p.m. tomorrow.  Hopefully either the broadcast will be repeated – or a commercial recording will follow, to be added to those already made of three other Gipps symphonies by the same ensemble – or, ideally, both!