“To me narrative in music is almost everything” said Christopher Gunning in an interview in 2014, a few months before he commenced work on his Eighth Symphony. “I believe that my music can tell stories”. His own story is unique in British music; an aspiring classical composer who made a career in film and television before emerging in retirement as a symphonist of striking originality and power. Perhaps William Alwyn (1905-1985)—who used the income from his film scores to subsidise his ambitions as a symphonist—comes closest. But few British composers since Vaughan Williams have achieved anything quite like the extraordinary “third act” of Gunning’s career: the thirteen symphonies that he completed between his 57th birthday and his death in March 2023 at the age of 78.

Christopher Gunning was born in Cheltenham but raised in Hendon, North London. His father Alexis was a pianist and composer, his mother Janet was a gifted pianist, and Christopher took to the upright piano in his parents’ home from an early age. “Composing always seemed to be second nature to me” he recalled. “I used to invent pieces at the piano long before I could read music. In my teen years I spent hours and hours listening to everything from Miles Davis and Charlie Parker to the pop music of the day and Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartók, Stravinsky and Schoenberg”. At the Guildhall School of Music he studied with a master-symphonist—Edmund Rubbra—and a true musical polymath, the late Richard Rodney Bennett, who took him on as an assistant.

By his mid-twenties Gunning was composing original scores for documentary films and working as arranger and orchestrator for artists as varied as Dudley Moore, Cilla Black, Shirley Bassey and Mel Tormé. Meanwhile, the music that he wrote for a series of classic TV commercials still evokes the 1970s; at least, for those who were there. Martini (It’s The Right One) and Black Magic chocolates were among the brands defined by Gunning’s inimitable melodic flair. From there, it was a natural transition into TV and movies, and in what he half-jokingly called his “middle period” Gunning’s music for (among others) Agatha Christie’s Poirot, La Vie en Rose, When the Whales Came, Wild Africa and the BBC’s Middlemarch won him a string of BAFTA and Ivor Novello awards, and even more nominations.

And then, three years shy of his 60th birthday, Gunning completed his first symphony, and then kept writing symphonies: thirteen in total, all created between 2001 and 2023 by a composer who might reasonably have been expected to retire to his home in Croxley Green to walk his dog Sasha and tend his garden. In addition to his symphonies, Gunning composed chamber music, a concert paraphrase of one of his best-loved TV scores (Poirot Variants—2002) and concertos for saxophone (1998), piano (2001), oboe (2009), clarinet (2009), flute (2010), guitar (2011) and cello (2013) as well as two violin concertos (2012 and 2015). In 2014, asked about his change of direction, Gunning explained that:

I’ve spent the greater part of my career writing music for the media. I decided roughly 10 to 15 years ago that I was going to change course, but what I was actually doing was returning to my first love which is … I suppose we have to call it “serious classical music”. I actually set out at the age of 20 to be England’s next symphonist and kind-of got sidetracked. There are demands in writing concert music that one never comes anywhere near while writing film scores (the reverse is also true, incidentally)—the demands of writing a piece that holds your attention over an extended span.

What I’ve been keen to do in my symphonies is to compose music that is relatively easy to follow, so it does have themes and it does have motifs. Although on the face of it these are personal symphonies they’re more than that. Other people are going to listen to them and they’re going to find personal things too and that, of course, is one of the wonderful things about music—which is that you can’t help but communicate with other people. As a composer I view that as my job.

Gunning completed his 8th and 9th symphonies in February 2015 and January 2016 respectively—a critical juncture in his symphonic development. Later in 2016, he completed his single-movement Symphony No 10, which he regarded as a creative breakthrough (Kenneth Woods believes that he considered it his finest symphony). The experience prompted him to undertake a thorough revision of his Symphony No 2 (2003), a process that he might have extended to his other early symphonies, had he lived to do so.

But the 8th and 9th symphonies stand as a pairing in their own right: each scored for a moderately sized orchestra (the 8th has only one trumpet and no lower brass, while the 9th adds a second trumpet, a harp, and a small percussion section) and both grappling, in Gunning’s highly individual way, with the legacy of classical symphonic form. The 8th grows organically from its opening material (which returns, transformed, at the end of the symphony’s arc), but its formal lineage is classical. A sonata-form first movement and a finale that has something of the character of a scherzo frame the central slow movement—an overcast idyll, coloured by the contrasting songs of the flute and the cor anglais.

The 9th is on a larger scale, though it shares a family mood—open skies, forward movement and a definite but very personal air of the pastoral—with the 8th. It moves through a sonata-form first movement, a tense shadowy scherzo and a melancholy slow movement to a finale whose energetic motor rhythms and soaring lyricism build to an optimistic (if unexpected) conclusion. This is not a self-consciously monumental Ninth Symphony in the sense of Beethoven; Mahler or Bruckner: Gunning’s creative energy never flagged, and ideas for one symphony seem to have rushed upon him even while he was working on another. The composer offered no explanation—biographical or otherwise—for these two symphonies, which he never heard performed. But he was very clear about the spirit in which they were created:

Certainly there’s a strong narrative [but] I do think with certain exceptions music does not behave at its best when it’s trying to be specific. It’s much better when it’s dealing with emotions; and general emotions, at that. I believe this piece has a strong emotional flavour but if you try and untangle the story you’re going to end up with your own story—and to me, that is absolutely perfect.

Signum Classics © 2025

When you recorded Gunning’s 2nd, 10th and 12th symphonies, you worked closely with the composer. Did he offer any insights into the 8th and 9th?

Kenneth Woods: Sadly, I know very little about the circumstances of these particular symphonies because I didn’t have the chance to discuss them with him. My sense is that this was a period where he was finding more of a structural sense of what he wanted to be doing. There’s a lot of confidence in these two symphonies. Chris was very self-critical in certain ways, but he also had a real sense that this was not dilly-dallying for him. He really felt that he had something important to say in the medium of the symphony.

Unlike much contemporary music, the scores of both symphonies seem very economical—not necessarily what one would expect from a composer who was accustomed to film and TV budgets.

KW: Yes, I love that about him—there’s none of that needing to prove one’s worth by how many obscure percussion instruments you’re asking for. There’s none of that; nothing that’s difficult for difficulty’s sake, though some of his melodic writing is actually very tricky to pull off! But it’s the symphony orchestra as we all know it and he gives the musicians a chance to do what they do best, which is to contribute. You never quite know what makes a recording session work well, but the orchestra seemed particularly enthusiastic and energised for the 8th and 9th symphonies.

Do you sense any particular influences in Gunning’s music? Did he see himself as part of a tradition?

KW: He was very keenly aware of being an English composer, but he didn’t just want to be English in that post-Vaughan Williams sense. I think the listener senses lots and lots of melody in his music, but there are also 12-tone rows, there’s lots of work with motivic cells. He was very keen that it should have that kind of craft, and also that the voice was still very much his own. I mean, you can tell it’s the guy who wrote the Martini commercials. There’s something about the way he writes a melody.

What do the 8th and 9th symphonies tell us about Gunning the symphonist?

KW: They’re very complementary of each other: you can hear that they come from a similar moment, a little bit like Beethoven Seven and Eight. There’s a confidence; and a security about the idea of writing a melodic lyrical symphony that is of our time. You sense that he’s becoming more and more comfortable with the friction between a very rigorous Germanic motivic approach and something that’s filmic and full of melody. He’s saying, “Actually that’s not a problem for me—I can knit these together very successfully”. And so in both scores there’s a lot of wonderful, rich, intellectual underpinning, and it’s gorgeous to listen to.

Richard Bratby © 2025