The recent death of Ruth Gipps robbed British musical life of one of its most industrious and beloved figures. Born in 1921, she was a gifted child pianist, entering the Royal College of Music at the tender age of 16 where she studied composition under Vaughan Williams, Gordon Jacob and R. O. Morris. Her tone-poem Knight in Armour was premiered by Sir Henry Wood at the Last Night of the 1942 Proms. Three years later, George Weldon gave the first performance of her First Symphony with the CBSO, of which Gipps was by now a member (she played the cor anglais part and was also the soloist in a Glazunov piano concerto on the same bill!). In 1955, she founded the London Repertoire Orchestra for budding students and amateurs (tirelessly running it for the next 31 years), and four years later she joined the staff of Trinity College to teach composition and harmony. When, in 1967, her former teacher Gordon Jacob retired from the RCM, Gipps was appointed as his successor. Ten years later, she took up the post of Senior Lecturer in Music at Kingston University.
Gipps embarked on the Second of her five symphonies in August 1945. The work plays without a break for nearly 24 minutes and falls more or less readily into a four-movement scheme, comprising a sonorously tolling introduction leading to a satisfyingly developed first and second subject, a tattoo-like Tempo di marcia processional and gravely wistful Adagio (reminders, both, that the war had only recently concluded), followed by the reappearance of the first-movement material and a rather grudgingly jubilant apotheosis. It is a thoroughly likeable creation over which the spirit of VW hovers benignly, and it’s well worth getting to know, especially when given with such vigour and obvious affection as here. Very decent sound, too.
Like Gipps, Manchester-born Arthur Butterworth (b.1923) enjoyed a stint as an orchestral musician, playing the trumpet in both the Scottish National and Halle. The First of his four symphonies was first heard at the 1957 Cheltenham Festival under Barbirolli, though the composer traces its origins back to a bracing March day in 1947 when he heard a radio broadcast of Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony. Indeed, Butterworth candidly admits that the latter piece’s magical opening bars are echoed at the outset of his own symphony, and there are copious allusions to the Finnish master elsewhere (most notably in the wintry second movement, where those two passages beginning at 4'59'' and 7'59'' unashamedly pay homage to the first movements of the Fourth and Fifth respectively). Cast in a traditional four movements, it’s a big work lasting some 40 minutes, powerfully evocative of the North and full of bleak beauty, strongly argued and confidently scored (especially in the orchestral storm of the finale, which generates an exhilarating physicality). Douglas Bostock directs with unflagging purpose and energy, and the playing has admirable spirit (a special word of praise to the Munich horns for their superbly confident contribution when ascending the stratospheric heights towards the works tempestuous close).
All told, a most enterprising and valuable pairing. '