Ruth Gipps in Seattle and Sussex

It is only a few days before another new milestone is marked in the unfolding Ruth Gipps revival:  this coming Saturday (25th January), the United States première of her haunting, otherworldly Fourth Symphony will be given by the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Adam Stern.  The concert starts at 2 p.m. (US Pacific Time) in the Benaroya Hall in the orchestra’s home city.  Some other interesting pieces are on the menu as well, including a piece by Mel Bonis, a name I hadn’t known before reading of this concert.  More details are here: http://seattlephil.org/concerts-and-tickets/legendary-women/.  I hope this performance scores as resounding a success as the same orchestra’s première of the Second Symphony in March 2018, and that it brings the music of this remarkable, distinctive composer to ever more music-lovers.

Here’s conductor Adam Stern explaining some of the hidden patterns and ideas that underpin the symphony:

Ruth Gipps’ star is rising on this side of the Atlantic, too: at least two forthcoming British concerts will include her music.  One is a concert at Bromsgrove School (Worcs.), whose first item is ‘Cringlemire Garden’, impression for string orchestra, op. 39: https://www.eso.co.uk/kannehmason-bromsgrove2020/: this will take place a week tomorrow, on Friday January 31, 2020 at 7.30 p.m.

The other is an interesting-looking concert whose centrepiece is ‘On Windover Hill’, a new cantata by Nathan James in praise of the curious chalk figure of the Long Man of Wilmington on the Sussex Downs, but which also includes an excerpt from ‘Goblin Market’, Ruth Gipps’ setting (op. 40) of Christina Rossetti’s poem.  The concert starts at 7.45 p.m. on Saturday, 7 March, at Boxgrove Priory near Chichester.  More information here: https://www.castleymusic.com/onwindoverhill.

Many thanks to all musicians and organisers of these concerts!

Ruth Gipps: the revival gathers pace

Conductor Adam Stern, under whom the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra recently gave the United States première performance of Ruth Gipps’ symphony no. 2, was kind enough, on the very day of the concert, to send in a comment to this blog to report its success!

Ruth Gipps’ Symphony scored a decided triumph earlier today. The audience cheered it with genuine and rousing enthusiasm. I was so thankful for the orchestra’s ultra-committed performance, and especially for the incredible gift Gipps has given to us.

If this was any indication of the effect her music can have on first-time hearers, then her INEVITABLE revival (of which I fully intend to keep being a part) will bring a great deal of joy to a great many people. 

Ecstatically yours, 

Adam

This makes thoroughly pleasing reading, to say the least!  I can only repeat my thanks to the Seattle Philharmonic for going to the trouble of putting this performance on, bringing this neglected English composer out of the shadows and to an international audience.

And now more good news from East Sussex, the county of Ruth Gipps’ birth.  A concert of chamber music, with a programme mostly of her music — pieces completely unheard as far as I am concerned — is due to be given at St. John the Baptist’s church in the village of Ripe, where the composer was organist during the 1980s.  It  is part of the Villages Music Festival, and will take place at 7.30 p.m. this coming 29th June, 2018. The concert announcement, not failing to seize a golden punning opportunity, puts it most aptly: ‘The time is ripe’!

Ruth Gipps: Symphony no. 3, third movement, Scherzo

Up on the Downs

Westwards along the South Downs Way, between Southease and Firle Beacon.

It was not quite the mid-March walk I had had in mind, into a penitential head-wind and in temperatures below freezing, up on an unsheltered ridge of the South Downs…  I did not reach Firle Beacon as I had hoped to.  But I don’t regret the excursion.  The Downs were bare and brazenly prehistoric, different from the wooded North Downs I know: impassively stranger than bohemian Brighton or respectable Eastbourne or even than Lewes, grey in the distance with all its tales and secrets.  There is so much of so little of England.

It has been a hard Lent this year, as if there is definitely to be no hint of Spring before Easter.  Let us hope it will turn out to have done us good!