Our end-of-year review continues with a selection of four albums (!!) recorded this year by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. 2025 has seen them make a number of records dedicated to music by British women composers, historical and contemporary. In addition to these four, Errollyn Wallen: Orchestral Works appeared in our review of 2025 albums by contemporary composers.
Composer Grace Williams has always been a recognizable musical figure in Wales. After her death in 1977 many of her works fell into obscurity outside her native country and have only recently been enjoying a revival. Grace Williams: Orchestral Works (Resonus, 2025) is a mix of first recordings of some pieces and new recordings on much-improved equipment. Castell Carnarfon (1969) gets its first commercial recording on this album, as does Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon (1939). The Ballads for Orchestra (1968) and the Sea Sketches (1944) have both been recorded before, though not recently. John Andrews and the BBC Orchestra’s 2025 recording provide a sleek and sonically satisfying update to the vintage recordings. Though outwardly the album doesn’t give much of its Welshness away—there are no prominent red dragons or other national emblems on it— its four pieces commemorate important events and take inspiration from Welsh literature and landscape. Castell Carnarfon was written for the investiture of the now-King Charles III as Prince of Wales; Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon depicts moments from Welsh mythology surrounding the goddess Rhiannon, who in all the iterations of tales about her represents the connection between the mortal world and the Otherworld; the Ballads for Orchestra were written for the 1968 National Eisteddfod (an annual festival of Welsh culture) held in Williams’ hometown of Barry in South Wales; the five movements of the Sea Sketches depict the natural beauty of the Vale of Glamorgan and its historic coastline. Perhaps predictably, the sea has been a popular topic among British composers, and many of their works depicting it have become concert favorites over the years. The most satisfying thing about this album, however, is Williams’ magisterial approach to her writing for orchestra, followed very closely by John Andrews’s and the BBC Philharmonic’s devotion to what she’s written. The album is available to purchase from Resonus Records, and to stream via Tidal, Spotify, and Apple Music.
Dr. Samantha Ege—a favorite artist of ours at WPA and a regular fixture in our news writing—is the featured soloist on the BBCPO’s Avril Coleridge-Taylor: Piano Concerto and Orchestral Works. (Resonus, 2025) This is the first album recorded of entirely Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s music. Her legacy has long been overshadowed by that of her famous father, Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, whose music has also enjoyed a justified and welcome revival in recent years. Over the course of her career she was an acclaimed singer (soprano), pianist, composer, and conductor, and one of her many distinctions is being the first woman to conduct an ensemble on the Hyde Park bandstand — the H.M. Royal Marines. This album aims to showcase the full range of her orchestral compositions, from early to late career. Her very first piece for orchestra, To April (1930/31), appears alongside From the Hills (1934); Sussex Landscape (1940); In Memoriam: To the R.A.F. (1945); her undated Valse Caprice; her celebratory and exuberant Piano Concerto with movements dedicated to the memories of Sir Edward Elgar, her father, and “the friends who inspired me to write this work,” (1938); her Comet Prelude (1952/53), and the most recent, her In Memoriam: Largo for Orchestra (1967, revised in 1980). The only piece on this album that is not a premiere recording is Sussex Landscape, which the Chineke! Orchestra premiered on an album alongside works by her father in 2022. This new album is a fabulous collection! It is available to purchase from Resonus Records, and to stream from Tidal, Spotify, and Apple Music.
In 2025 The BBC Philharmonic has released collections #3 and #4 in its series of recordings of the orchestral works of Ruth Gipps. The first installment, released in 2018, contains her second and fourth symphonies (1945 and 1972, respectively), her tone poem Knight in Armor (1940), and her Song for Orchestra (1948); the second, released in 2022, contains the third symphony (1965), the Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra (1941) dedicated to Sir Arthur Bliss, her Chanticleer Overture (1944), and her tone poem Death on a Pale Horse (1943). Gipps was an accomplished oboist and pianist as well as a composer, and many of her earlier works show the influence of her instrumental training. The first of the new volumes, Ruth Gipps: Orchestral Works, Volume 3 continues the series theme of surveying her wartime and post-war work on a single album. It contains her first symphony (1942), her horn concerto (1968) with Martin Owen as featured soloist, her Coronation Procession (1953) commemorating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and two tone poems for small orchestras Ambervalia (1988) and Cringlemire Garden (1952). The works for smaller orchestras are particularly satisfying, as they show what Gipps’s 
talents can do in the face of orchestrational limits—an important proving ground for any composer. It is available from Chandos Records, and to stream via Spotify and Apple Music. The fourth and most recent album, Ruth Gipps: Orchestral Works, Volume 4, leans more into her post-war work. It includes her Concerto for Violin (1943) that she wrote for her older brother; Leviathan (1969), her concertante work for double bassoon and orchestra; and her fifth symphony (1982) dedicated to Sir William Walton—all world premiere recordings. Gipps’s music has been described as indebted to the English pastoral school [Vaughan Williams, et. al] but not pastoral in its subject matter. This album shows the remarkable arc of formal experimentation during Gipps’ career within this tonal language that resists the modernist gestures of serialism. The fifth symphony has a form-within-a-form for its final movement: a Missa Brevis in five parts plus a coda, following the more traditional Allegro, Andante, and Scherzo movements. It’s also written for enormous forces—quadruple winds, six horns, two harps, and a veritable catalogue of percussion instruments. The album is available from Chandos Records, and to stream via Spotify and Apple Music.
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