Gipps: Piper of Dreams

Among the young Ruth Gipps’ teachers at London’s Royal College of Music from 1937 were Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams, two of the most renowned composers of their day. This wonderful album of music for oboe, played with expressive and technical brilliance by Juliana Koch, shows how formative both were in Gipps’ music education. There’s an optimistic lyricism to the music, periodically undercut with fleeting moments of angularity, and its modal qualities imbue it with a folk-like idiom, so prevalent in British music of the time. This album presents works spanning the years from Gipps’ time at the Royal College up to the 1990s, the decade of her death. Her Oboe Sonata No. 1, composed when Gipps was just 19, displays an astonishingly mature grasp of form and harmonic interest, while the Kensington Garden Suite is a delightful display of wit and nostalgic beauty. The Sea-weed Song shows her gift for a floating vocal melody. The late Oboe Sonata No. 2 that opens the album is undoubtedly Gipps at her best (there’s Poulenc wit in there, too). Composed in 1985, it shows how far Gipps had progressed, but also how determined she was to nurture rather than transform her style.