“To compose music is to do something off the beaten track, even if you're a man. But if you're a woman composer it is considered very odd indeed." So said Welsh composer, Grace Williams, who followed in Morfydd Owen’s celebrated footsteps to show her detractors that musical talent is gender blind. Sadly, Williams’ work is still not given the attention it deserves, but today the ±«Óãtv Philharmonic unearth a seldom-heard gem from a film score Williams composed in the late 1940s. The feature film, Blue Scar, depicts ordinary lives touched by the nationalisation of the coal mines and in her score for it, Williams conjures an atmosphere of melancholy beauty. In Blue Scar: Mountain Scene, we hear Williams’ gift for painterly observation, a talent which must have impressed her tutors at the Royal College of Music. It was here that she studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams in the 1920s, about a decade before Ruth Gipps attended.
Gipps could also count Vaughan Williams amongst her tutors at RCM, but esteemed contacts and talent aside, her success was as much the result of a fearlessly determined nature. She worked at a time when it was hard for people to accept female compositional talent and she was referred to in the press on one occasion as a ‘housewife composer.’ Wherever she met with condescension and discrimination, Gipps created her own opportunities, and in 1955 she set up the London Repertoire Orchestra (LRO), benefitting hundreds of young professionals. She dedicated her Horn Concerto, which we hear today, to her son, Lance Baker, who gave the first performance of it in 1969 at the Duke's Hall (Guildhall School of Music) with the LRO. Very much in the Romantic tradition, this is a technically complex piece for the horn, and this afternoon we hear it in the expert hands of Martin Owen, Principal Horn with the ±«Óãtv Symphony orchestra. We also hear Gipps’ rarely recorded Symphony No.1 in F minor, described by critics as ‘bold and confident, sensitive and striking’, and her Coronation Procession, a festive march composed in 1953 in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II.
Gipps: Horn Concerto
Williams: Blue Scar: Mountain scene
Gipps: Coronation Procession
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Gipps: Symphony No. 1 in F minor Op. 22