Ruth Gipps - Seascape, Op. 53 (1958)

Ruth Dorothy Louisa ("Wid") Gipps MBE (21 February 1921 – 23 February 1999) was an English composer, oboist, pianist, conductor and educator. She composed music in a wide range of genres, including five symphonies, seven concertos and many chamber and choral works. She founded both the London Repertoire Orchestra and the Chanticleer Orchestra and served as conductor and music director for the City of Birmingham Choir. Later in her life she served as chairwoman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain.

Please support my channel on
https://Ko-fi.com/bartjebartmans

Seascape, Op. 53 for double woodwind quintet
Dedication: For the Portia Wind Ensemble

Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Live rec.: https://youtu.be/i3hU0F646bk?si=DBx4ZO5HroYlmc9c

Seascape was written in 1958 for the Portia Ensemble, as ensemble which Gipps founded herself, made up entirely of women. It is an example of programmatic music, the sounds conjuring up the beauty as well as the stormy nature of the sea. It is thought to have been inspired by a trip Gipps took to Kent where she was giving lectures and, during her stay in a coastal hotel, could hear the sea from her bed. The work is in ternary form with a wonderfully rich rhythmic and percussive central section.

Ruth Gipps was an accomplished well-rounded musician, as a soloist on both oboe and piano as well as a prolific composer. Her repertoire included works such as Arthur Bliss' Piano Concerto and Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande. When she was 33 a shoulder injury ended her performance career, and she decided to focus her energies on conducting and composition. Gipps claimed to know from a young age that her main interest lay in composing, stating,

I had of course known all along that playing the piano was my job; the first concert merely confirmed it. But I also knew without a shadow of a doubt, although I had not yet written anything, that I was a composer. Not that I wanted to be a composer – that I was one.

An early success came when Sir Henry Wood conducted her tone poem Knight in Armour at the Last Night of the Proms in 1942. Gipps' music is marked by a skillful use of instrumental color and often shows the influence of Vaughan Williams, rejecting the trends in avant-garde modern music such as serialism and twelve-tone music. She considered her orchestral works, her five symphonies in particular, as her greatest works. She also produced two substantial piano concertos. After the war Gipps turned her attention to chamber music, and in 1956 she won the Cobbett Prize of the Society of Women Musicians for her Clarinet Sonata, Op. 45. In March 1945, she performed Alexander Glazunov's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the City of Birmingham Orchestra as a piano soloist while also, in the same program, performing in her own Symphony No. 1 on cor anglais under the baton of George Weldon.