Edward Gregson attended recording sessions last week in the BBC Studios at Media City, Salford, when the BBC Philharmonic under Ben Gernon recorded his music for a new CD on the Chandos label (to be released in the Autumn of 2025). All the works will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 later in the year. It will be the fifth CD recording of his concertos and orchestral music in a series which Chandos commenced in 2003.
Three of his concertos were recorded: those for Tuba (1976), Oboe (2020), and Viola (2023), along with two shorter works for piano and orchestra, for which the composer was the soloist: A Song for Sue (originally written in 1966 as an engagement present for his wife to be), and A Song for Bram (written recently in memory of the conductor Bramwell Tovey, a close friend of the composer).
The most well-known, and certainly the most frequently performed of all his concertos, is the one for Tuba, commissioned for John Fletcher, the then principal tuba of the London Symphony Orchestra and long-standing member of the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. This concerto has had countless performances world-wide and has been recorded over a dozen times, but this is the first time that Chandos has recorded the orchestral version. The soloist is Ross Knight, principal tuba of the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande in Geneva, and a former winner of the BBC Radio 2 Brass Musician of the Year.
The other concertos featured are very recent works: the Oboe Concerto (A Vision in a Dream) was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in 2020 for Jennifer Galloway, principal oboe in the BBC Philharmonic for over 20 years. She premiered and broadcast it with the BBC Philharmonic and Ben Gernon in Leeds Town Hall in 2020. The Viola Concerto was commissioned by the Presteigne Festival and written for Rachel Roberts, who premiered it in 2023 with the Presteigne Festival Orchestra under George Vass
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The composer has had a close relationship with the BBC Philharmonic since 1994, when it commissioned and premiered his Clarinet Concerto, written for Michael Collins. Other commissions for the orchestra since then have included Dream Song (commissioned for the ‘Mahler in Manchester’ Festival of 2010), and the Oboe Concerto (2020). The orchestra has also recorded three previous CDs of his music on the Chandos label under conductors Martyn Brabbins, Clark Rundell and Bramwell Tovey, together with soloists including Michael Collins, Olivier Charlier, Nelson Goerner, Ole Edvard Antonsen, Nobuya Sugawa, Richard Watkins and Wissam Boustany.
The composer also has a close association with the conductor of this new recording, Ben Gernon, who he has known since Ben was a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and played the Gregson Tuba Concerto for his Entrance Exam. Ben Gernon has performed and recorded music by the composer in the last few years, and is one of the UK’s most successful younger generation conductors.He was the youngest conductor to be appointed by the BBC, becoming Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic from 2017-2020, and recently conducted for the first time at Glyndebourne and also made his first podium appearances with the LSO and LPO. He is also a broadcaster and presenter for BBC Radio 3.