A Double Treat for Ruth Gipps’ Birthday

This year there is even more reason than usual to celebrate the birthday of the British composer Ruth Gipps (1921–1999).  Two new records — a third and fourth volume of her orchestral music — are coming out in quick succession, both issued by Chandos Records.  Volume III, which was released last month, includes her First Symphony, which remained unperformed and unrecorded from 1942 until a BBC Radio 3 broadcast on 22nd February last year.  There is also her delightfully optimistic Horn Concerto and a triple helping of orchestral pieces: the Coronation Procession, Ambervalia and Cringlemire Garden.  Volume IV, due for release on April 11th this year, will include her elusive Fifth Symphony, along with her Violin Concerto and Leviathan for double-bassoon.   In both cases we once again have conductor Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra to thank for their musicianship.

It is the prospect of the two symphonies that I find most exciting.  Of the five neglected symphonies of this hitherto-neglected composer, so little seemed to be said of Gipps’ First Symphony that I had imagined it would simply never be heard.  Symphony No. 5 I knew, but only from a scratchy recording of its 1982 première which, shockingly, had been its only performance until, in April 2023, Gipps Revival veterans Adam Stern and the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra stepped up to the plate with the American première.  At the second British performance a month later, I marvelled, for the hundredth time, that such wonderful music could have been so completely sidelined.  I have been waiting for years for a recording.  Now, however, with these new discs, which I have every reason to believe will match the standard of their forerunners, the putting right of a great injustice in British music will, I dare say, be more or less accomplished.  There is now every reason to hope for continued and frequent appearances of Gipps’ music on the radio, which in turn will bring her music to new ears, and hopefully encourage the programming of her music in live concerts.

As I have said before, the Ruth Gipps saga shows us how entirely and visibly an artist holding to his or her integrity may be vindicated in the end — however unlikely it may have seemed, however implacable the prejudices of fashion may have been — and it ought to give heart to all artists, writers and poets who are tempted to despair in the face of disdain or indifference.

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 her 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 her, 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!