Recording of the Week, Ruth Gipps from Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic

Following superb recordings of three symphonies, the Oboe Concerto and two tone poems, Rumon Gamba continues flying the flag for British composer Ruth Gipps today with the BBC Philharmonic. Born in Bexhill-on Sea in 1921, Gipps studied composition with Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob, and was already established as a fine oboist and pianist when a performance of her Knight in Armour at the BBC Proms brought her into the public eye as a composer in 1942.

The album begins with the world premiere recording of the Coronation Procession from early 1953: composed five months before the coronation of Elizabeth II, the work was not commissioned for the ceremony but written as a speculative anticipation of the atmosphere on the route to Westminster Abbey in the coming summer.

It's a little gem of a piece, relatively light on pomp and circumstance until the final stretch but brimming with colour, energy and excitement as Gipps evokes cavalry, fanfares and the poised elegance of the young queen with almost cinematic vividness. In lieu of the broad string themes which sit at the heart of similar works by Elgar and Walton, Gipps gives us a minor-key melody for her own instrument, the cor anglais (which features prominently in several works on the album) before the music swells to a suitably majestic climax as the Procession enters the Abbey.

A much later work on a smaller canvas follows – named after a Roman agricultural fertility rite, Ambarvalia was composed in the late 1980s as an elegy for Gipps’s friend and fellow composer Adrian Cruft (also a former pupil of Gordon Jacob). The mood is luminous and wistful rather than overtly funereal: Gipps pays tribute with ‘one auspicious and one dropping eye’ in a piece that’s shot through with whispers of folk-dance and shimmering contributions from the celeste.

The other miniature on the album is the evocative Cringlemire Garden from 1942, depicting an idyll near Lake Windermere with spare beauty: scored for strings only, it seems to tip its cap to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis in the big tuttis, and allows the section-principals ample opportunity to shine as they trade folk-inflected solos with easy rhapsodic grace.

Gipps’s Horn Concerto was written in 1968 as a gift for her son Lance Baker, who was just out of college and embarking on a career which eventually took him to the Co-Principal chair at English National Opera. Baker premiered the work under his mother’s direction with the London Repertoire Orchestra (which Gipps founded in 1955 to provide students and talented amateurs with the opportunity to explore unfamiliar scores together each week).

Although the soloist is put through their paces with some formidably tricky technical writing (Martin Owen handles the wide leaps across the registers and flurries of double-tonguing with easy flair here), this is a distinctly collaborative work rather than a straight-up showpiece: in places it almost sounds like a Concerto For Orchestra as the horn trades motifs with the woodwind principals at top speed, particularly in the folksy, high-energy scherzo. Cor anglais, celeste and xylophone all have their moments in the spotlight, and the overall impression is of an imaginative, exhilarating work which really deserves to get out more.

But perhaps the main event on the album is the first recording of Symphony No. 1, completed shortly after that breakthrough Proms performance of Knight in Armour under Henry Wood. The first movement and the scherzo in particular are animated by the tension between pastoral and martial elements which is characteristic of so much orchestral music written during the Second World War, with rhapsodic woodwind solos frequently swept aside by menacing trumpet fanfares – and there are several all-guns-blazing passages which sound for all the world like they could be underscoring a sea-battle in a Hollywood epic.

The slow movement stands out for its ravishing cor anglais solo (played by Gipps herself at the premiere with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, of which she was a member during the War), and the finale brings a thrilling synthesis of material from previous movements before the music seems to disappear over the horizon. Great stuff.