Page 777 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

On the small screen, alongside Poirot, these included Porterhouse Blue (1987),
Middlemarch (1994) – he won a Bafta for each – Dennis Potter’s final dramas Karaoke
and Cold Lazarus (1996) and the gardening-and-murder series Rosemary and Thyme
(2003-06).

He wrote the music for the features When the Whales Came (1989, the filming of which
he had stumbled across while on a family holiday in the Isles of Scilly), Firelight (1997),
and the Édith Piaf biopic La Môme, also known as La Vie en Rose (2008), winning his
fourth Bafta as well as a Czech Lion award.

Gunning’s final film score was for the controversial Grace of Monaco (2014), after
which he concentrated on writing concert music in the classical tradition, his first love
as a composer.
He had been producing works for live performance since the 80s, whether children’s
operas – Rainbow Planet (1983); Aunt Vita (1997) – piano preludes, a string quartet
(1997, revised in 2005) and the symphonic portrait Yorkshire Glory (1989),
commissioned by Yorkshire Television for an unnarrated documentary (the score
recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra).

His breakthrough concert work was the 1998 saxophone concerto On Hungerford
Bridge, recorded by John Harle to notable critical acclaim. This was the first of 10
concertos, including works for piano (2001), clarinet (2009), flute (2010, plus the
single-movement Spirit of the Mountain, 2014), guitar (2011), violin (2012, plus a
Poirot Fantasy from the same year) and cello (2013).

His 2009 Oboe Concerto was written for and recorded by his oboist daughter Verity.
Other works included several orchestral poems – Storm (2002), Night Voyage (2012),
and Birdflight (2016) – inspired by the natural world, concern for which was a constant
throughout his life whether in music or tending his garden.

His most significant lasting contribution to the concert repertoire, however, was his
sequence of 13 symphonies, the first in a single, pastoral-dramatic movement composed
in 2001 and No 13 completed in 2020. Most have been recorded, by various labels, two
of the finest being the single-movement No 10 (2016), in which his high regard for the
music of Sibelius can be felt without ever sounding like the Finnish master, and No
12 (2018), a rare example of a truly convincingly structured two-movement symphony.