FROM 3PM - 5.30PM
TICKETS £10 INCLUDING TEA
CHILDREN 11 AND UNDER HALF PRICE
FROM 3PM - 5.30PM
TICKETS £10 INCLUDING TEA
CHILDREN 11 AND UNDER HALF PRICE
2025 VILLAGES MUSIC FESTIVAL DATES 28TH JUNE-6TH JULY, COMMENCING WITH A PERFORMANCE OF PUCCINI’S ‘LA BOHEME’.
Fruday 29th June
The Piper of Dreams
THE PIPER OF DREAMS
St John The Baptist Church
Ripe
BN8 6AU
A chamber music concert celebrating the music of the late Ruth Gipps, who lived in Sussex and was organist at Ripe in the 1980s. The programme includes music by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Bliss. Directed by Toby Hawks.
PERFORMANCE AT 7.30 PM. TICKETS £12.50
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PROGRAMME:
Arthur Bliss Conversations
Edward Elgar Andante and Allegro
Ruth Gipps Chamois / Suite for two violins / Cool Running Water / The Piper of Dreams / Lyric Fantasy / Evocation / Scherzo and Adagio
Gordon Jacob Four Fancies
Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending
THE PIPER OF DREAMS - A RUTH GIPPS RETROSPECTIVE
Ruth Gipps was a hugely significant figure in twentieth century British musical life. A child prodigy born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1921, she entered the Royal College of Music in 1937, where she studied composition, first with Ralph Vaughan Williams and then with Gordon Jacob. She lived a life of extraordinary creative and organsisational energy, composing an impressive catalogue of orchestral, choral and chamber music, on top of playing the oboe and cor anglais professionally, founding orchestras and teaching music at the highest level.
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Yet her music is unperformed and largely forgotten: if she is remembered at all, it is condescendingly, as an outspoken and 'difficult' woman in a man's musical world, where her richly lyrical, rhythmically inventive style, firmly rooted in twentieth-century tonality, was at odds with the prevailing taste for atonality and experimentalism.
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The time is ripe for a Ruth Gipps Retrospective.
In retirement, Gipps returned to Sussex, living at Tickerage Castle near Framfield until her death. From here she sallied forth, whatever the weather, in her open-top Morgan to conduct choirs, such as the Chalvington Singers, and play the organ in local churches, including Ripe - which forms the perfect venue for an enchanting introduction to Gipps's oeuvre.
In collaboration with Gipps’s son and daughter-in-law, violinist Toby Hawks has compiled a programme of Gipps’s chamber works spanning her whole career and reflecting the great breadth and charm of her small-scale output.
Interleaved with Gipps's works are works by four other giants of English music. Arthur Bliss's stylish Conversations burst onto the post-war musical scene in 1921 – just as Ruth Gipps did; Edward Elgar's early and seldom-heard Andante and Allegro was written for the instrument Gipps came to master and make her profession – the oboe. Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams both taught Gipps composition and had a lasting effect on her stylistic development: the former is represented by his delightful Four Fancies, and the latter by one of his loveliest works – The Lark Ascending – which received its orchestral première in 1921.
