Rumon Gamba’s rewarding championship of the music of Ruth Gipps continues with this, the third of the conductor’s series surveying her orchestral works. Gipps, born in 1921, was a true musical all-rounder, and wartime briefly provided chances to shine: her Symphony No 1 was first performed in 1942 by the CBSO, with Gipps in her day-job seat as the orchestra’s cor anglais player. (In the same concert she was the soloist in a piano concerto.) But this came with resentment from some male colleagues, one of whom, she later wrote, sabotaged the work’s premiere by playing out of sync.

Here, in the symphony’s first recording, the BBC Philharmonic does full justice to a work of ambitious scope – an early showcase for the blend of fluent lyricism and muscular rhythmic drive, untroubled by fashion, that would continue into Gipps’s later works. One of the most striking of those is the 1968 Horn Concerto she wrote for her son, engagingly played here by Martin Owen. Her Coronation Procession sounds unsurprisingly of its time; more rewarding are the wistfully lilting Ambarvalia, and Cringlemire Garden, a pastoral miniature for strings showing the gift for bittersweet melancholy that Gipps shared with her teacher, Vaughan Williams.

Listen on Apple Music: