The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla champion the music of a too-long neglected composer. A pupil of Vaughan Williams, Ruth Gipps started her career as an oboist with what was then the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1944, before becoming established as a composer. Her Symphony No. 2 takes a wide-screen, cinematic view of the Second World War, embracing exhilaration, anxiety and, finally, ecstatic rejoicing. Conflict of a very different kind runs through The Exterminating Angel Symphony by Thomas Adès (50 this year), inspired by Louis Buñuel’s Surrealist film.
Brahms’s Third Symphony strikes a more autumnal tone, inspired by a visit to the River Rhine in 1883. The critic Eduard Hanslick pronounced it ‘artistically the most nearly perfect’ of the composer’s symphonies to date.