Symphonies 2, 10 & 12
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Kenneth Woods
Signum Classics SIGCD 593
Full Price
The Review
Now 75, Christopher Gunning has had a long and distinguished career as a composer for TV and film. Anybody who has watched the Poirot series with David Suchet as the Belgian sleuth will immediately recognise the quality of his orchestration and his ability to catch the mood. Gunning also wrote the incidental music for Pam Ferris and Felcity Kendal’s Rosemary and Thyme series and many others.
Recognition for his concert works has taken far longer to come. There are reasons, valid ones, and they will perhaps explain why his music may always do better on disc than in an orchestra’s live season. The most glaring is style. Gunning is an English composer whose idiom would have felt conservative even in the 1950s. He was a student of Richard Rodney Bennett and Edmund Rubbra and, while he has the facility of the former there is little of the bite of the latter’s music. He says he ‘always thinks of his symphonies as novels, with characters in the form of themes or motifs which return and develop.’ The problem is that somehow the novels feel as though they are all period dramas, set around 1948. The closest comparison to his 10th Symphony (written in 2016) is Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antartica (written in 1952).
This does not mean that his music is unworthy of attention, only that its place in our time is a peculiar one. Kenneth Woods and BBC NOW approach the music with wholehearted commitment, treating these rather aimless symphonies as they would any masterpiece.
Like many British composers of the last 150 years, Gunning puts his compositions together with great competence and a natural feel for orchestral colour. However, also like many of them (for example Alexander Mackenzie, Granville Bantock and Hamilton Harty) the themes are not really distinctive enough to carry the structure. The quality of development is fine, the stitching exemplary, the orchestral blending done with great finesse but what exactly is being developed, stitched and blended?
Gunning’s Second Symphony, from 2003, comes closest to answering that question positively in the second part of the first movement. There is a tense scattering of passage work in upper strings and wind set against prolonged chords on brass and lower strings which gives its argument depth. The slow movement has long breaths of sound but somehow loses focus – perhaps because the harmonic sequences are not held together by any firm melody. In the short third movement there is just too little of consequence to be effective.
The latest symphony, his 12th, from 2018 is in two movements of equal duration. Gunning says it is ‘far more overtly tonal… more direct,’ than the earlier works. Just like them, though, it is perpetually in search of a really good idea – of the sort that he seems to find effortlessly in his incidental music. There are Sibelian and Ravelian flourishes in the second movement that suggest one is aching to get out but it never quite does. After all, if you are going to stick to the music vocab of the mid twentieth century – of Khatchaturian and Bernard Hermann – then you need a thumping good tune to carry it. On the other hand, if you are going to write abstract symphonic argument in the third decade of the 21st you need all the devices and colours you can muster – as Ades, Macmillan and Benjamin do. Gunning, rather sadly (because he is an admirable man and a fine professional) does neither.