Bright & Gipps: Works for Piano & Orchestra Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra & Charles Peebles

• Dora Bright (1862 - 1951): Piano Concerto No. 1 in A Minor:
• 1 Piano Concerto No. 1 in A Minor: I. Allegro moderato 13:58
• 2 Piano Concerto No. 1 in A Minor: II. Intermezzo - Andante espressivo 04:30
• 3 Piano Concerto No. 1 in A Minor: III. Finale. Allegro 05:58
• Variations for Piano & Orchestra:
• 4 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Thema. Semplice - Moderato 01:02
• 5 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Var. 1, Grazioso 00:54
• 6 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Var. 2, Con brio 00:55
• 7 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Var. 3, Andantino 01:14
• 8 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Var. 4, Tempo di valse 01:23
• 9 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Var. 5, Allegretto tranquillo 01:23
• 10 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Var. 6, Lento 03:15
• 11 Variations for Piano & Orchestra: Var. 7, Finale. Scherzo 06:34
• Ruth Gipps (1921 - 1999): Piano Concerto in G Minor, Op. 34:
• 12 Piano Concerto in G Minor, Op. 34: I. Allegro moderato 14:34
• 13 Piano Concerto in G Minor, Op. 34: II. Andante 05:50
• 14 Piano Concerto in G Minor, Op. 34: III. Vivace 05:55
• Ambarvalia, Op. 70:
• 15 Ambarvalia, Op. 70 07:54
• Total Runtime 01:15:19

Info for Bright & Gipps: Works for Piano & Orchestra

SOMM Recordings continues its championing of British music with revelatory performances of music for piano and orchestra by Dora Bright and Ruth Gipps. Separated by six decades – Bright born in 1862, Gipps in 1921 – both women shared a prodigious talent as pianists before turning to composition.

Three works – Bright’s A minor Piano Concerto and Variations for Piano and Orchestra and Gipps’s Ambarvalia receive first recordings alongside Gipps’s G minor Piano Concerto.

Admired by Liszt and George Bernard Shaw, Bright’s Piano Concerto (1892) demonstrates, says Robert Matthew-Walker in his illuminating notes, her distinctive “creative mastery and expressive character…clearly that of a composer who knows the solo instrument intimately; beautifully written, supremely well-laid out for the keyboard”.

Her Variations for Piano and Orchestra (1910) “is a remarkably impressive original composition, beautifully written for the solo instrument… skilfully orchestrated, shot through with much brilliant and quietly witty writing, technically fascinating and with unobtrusive master strokes of structural originality”.

A child-prodigy pianist and composer, Ruth Gipps studied oboe with Leon Goossens, piano with Arthur Alexander and composition with Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music. When her performing career was thwarted by a hand injury, she went on to compose five symphonies and several concertos, including the Piano Concerto in G minor, which boasts brilliantly virtuosic writing for soloist and orchestra. Gipps’s Ambarvalia is a rich, short orchestral study of Haydn-Mozart size without timpani.

Making her SOMM debut, the young British pianist Samantha Ward is the soloist for Bright’s Piano Concerto and Variations for Piano and Orchestra. Murray McLachlan returns to the label for Gipps’s Piano Concerto. His “adept fingerwork and energetic” contribution to Daydreams (SOMMCD233) featuring the chamber and instrumental music of Arthur Sullivan “does full justice to the scores”, declared MusicWeb International.

Also making welcome first appearances on SOMM are the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Charles Peebles.

Samantha Ward, piano
Murray McLachlan, piano
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Charles Peebles, conductor

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
is Britain’s oldest surviving professional symphony orchestra, dating from 1840. Vasily Petrenko was appointed Principal Conductor of the orchestra in September 2006 and in September 2009 became Chief Conductor until 2015. The orchestra gives over sixty concerts each season in Liverpool Philharmonic Hall and in recent seasons world première performances have included major works by Sir John Tavener, Karl Jenkins, Michael Nyman and Jennifer Higdon, alongside works by Liverpool-born composers John McCabe, Emily Howard, Mark Simpson and Kenneth Hesketh. The orchestra also tours widely throughout the United Kingdom and has given concerts in the United States, the Far East and throughout Europe. Recent additions to the orchestra’s extensive discography include Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony (2009 Classic FM/Gramophone Orchestral Recording of the Year), the world première performance of Sir John Tavener’s Requiem, the first discs of an ongoing Shostakovich cycle and Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3. The orchestra and its new music group, Ensemble 10/10, were jointly awarded Ensemble of the Year in the 2009 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards, the most prestigious accolade for live classical music-making in the United Kingdom. Ensemble 10/10 also won the Concert Series of the Year category.

Booklet for Bright & Gipps: Works for Piano & Orchestra