The main focus of interest on this third Chandos disc of Ruth Gipps’s orchestral music is the first recording of her First Symphony. It was written in 1942, when she was 21 years old, and first performed in 1945, so it’s been a long wait. But she was a precocious musical child and her Swiss mother, Hélène Bettina, was principal of the Bexhill School of Music, in which the family lived. Gipps went on to the Royal College of Music at a tender 16 and when her Symphony No 1 was composed it was already her Op 22. Its most impressive feature is a skilful command of the orchestra, which she deploys effectively and often sparingly: her teacher Gordon Jacob clearly passed on his expert knowledge. The Chandos publicity speaks of a ‘personal voice’ in this work but I have to confess that I failed to hear it. It is a very mainstream English ‘pastoral’ voice with an obvious debt to one or two phrases characteristic of Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, which was completed in 1921, the year Gipps was born; VW was also her teacher.

In his fascinating booklet note, Lewis Foreman says that much of the First Symphony’s music would not ‘have been out of place in a wartime film’. By the time of the well-known Horn Concerto of 1968 the music often audibly strays into (or out of) the film studio and this blends well with the general vein of ‘light music’ that the score inhabits. But unlike her near-exact contemporaries Doreen Carwithen and Malcolm Arnold, Gipps chose not to join the film industry; so I found a reference in a 1984 letter of hers to Alan Poulton about Arnold very revealing: ‘For years while he wrote a lot of film music he sailed close to the wind, and nearly tipped over into light music …’. Having marked in 2024 the centenary of another contemporary, Ernest Tomlinson, we surely shouldn’t be sniffy about light music any more and I intend no disrespect in finding most of this disc of Gipps to be in that very vein: even the serious-minded Symphony No 1 is mostly light music in reality but almost exclusively in the minor mode – no mean feat in itself!

These performances under the careful guidance of Rumon Gamba are exemplary in every way and superbly recorded. The other premiere recordings here are the Coronation Procession of 1953 – which sounds magnificent but lacks a genuinely good tune when one is desperately needed – and the affectionate Ambarvalia of 1988. The nostalgic 1952 Cringlemire Garden for strings was recorded recently in Pforzheim by Douglas Bostock (CPO, 3/22) and there are many versions of the Horn Concerto, most notably by the gloriously golden-toned David Pyatt (Lyrita, 6/07 but recorded in the mid-1990s) and the splendid Ben Goldscheider (Willowhayne, 5/22). Martin Owen for Chandos gives a stunningly athletic performance and Gipps mavens can go for this disc without reservation.