Bright & Gipps: Piano Concertos

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SOMM Recordings continues its championing of British music with revelatory performances of music for piano and orchestra by Dora Bright and Ruth Gipps. Admired by Liszt and George Bernard Shaw, Brights Piano Concerto (1892) demonstrates, says Robert Matthew-Walker in his illuminating notes, her distinctive creative mastery and expressive character. 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 Ambarvalia is a rich, short orchestral study of Haydn-Mozart size without timpani.