I.W.D Music #8

[jazzy_dave]

This is the very last post to do with the International Women's Day movement.

So, here is another batch of less well-known artists -

Dobrinka Tabakova - Double Piano Concerto [Together Remember to Dance]

Composed for the 2017 premiere in Holland given by the Jussen brothers and followed by a number of repeat performances. This was the first appearance of the work in Britain 2018.

1 Together
2 Remember @ 6.30
3 Dance @ 15:00

Peggy Glanville-Hicks - Tragic Celebration (1964)

Ruth Gibbs - Piano Concerto in G Minor, Op. 34: I. Allegro moderato

Conductor: Charles Peebles
Artist: Murray McLachlan
Orchestra: Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Composer: Ruth Gipps

Ruth Gibbs was born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1921. Her Swiss-born mother was an accomplished pianist and, recognising her daughter’s aptitude, taught her piano from an early age. Gipps was four years old when she gave her first public performance, at Grotrian Hall in London. It was from that moment on, she said later, that she knew without a shadow of a doubt, that playing the piano was her job and that she wanted to be a composer.

A highly gifted and versatile musician, on 25th March 1945, Gipps took part in a public concert as the soloist in Glazunov’s Piano Concerto before rejoining the woodwind section of the City of Birmingham Orchestra as an oboist for the premiere of her first symphony. Four more symphonies were to follow. But a troublesome injury to her hand, which she had sustained in childhood, brought her career as a concert pianist to an end in the 1950s. By this stage she had achieved some notable successes as a composer. The recipient of several composition prizes, an early high point was the selection of her orchestral work “Knight in Armour” by Sir Henry Wood for the Last Night of the Proms broadcast in 1942.

Awarded a doctorate in music in 1947, Gipps held teaching posts at London’s Trinity College of Music, the Royal College of Music and Kingston Polytechnic and did terms as Chair of both the Composers’ Guild and the newly founded British Music Information Centre. There’s little doubt though that Gipps faced considerable gender discrimination in several of the fields in which she excelled. On discovering her enjoyment of conducting, she overcame this by founding two orchestras, the London Repertoire Orchestra in 1955, and then the Chanticleer Orchestra.

A composition pupil of Vaughan Williams, Gipps defined her music as, “a follow-on from her teacher, Bliss and Walton, the three giants of British music since the Second World War.” While all these composers can be heard in her music, her music has its own distinctive and original qualities.
Publicly outspoken, Gipps remained firmly anti-modernist. She regarded 12-tone music, serial music, electronic music and avant-garde music as utter rubbish. From the late 1950s, the musical establishment felt her music was out of step with the times, and they bypassed her work. She did have some admirers, including Sir Arthur Bliss, whom she had first met in 1942, who continued to support and admire her music but in general, it fell to her own resourcefulness to get her music heard, arranging performances, which she would then conduct with her own orchestras.




Well as Ruth was born in Sussex here is another lass from the same county next to Kent - and well known in folk circles -


Shirley Collins - Wondrous Love

ENJOY