Serious composers write ad music too

00:00 06:59

Richard Bratby has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Next month in London, they’re celebrating a composer you’ve probably never heard of, but whose work you’re sure to have heard. If you’ve watched much British TV or cinema in the past half century, you’ll already know his music, and better than you think. A quick test of age: do you remember ‘The Right One’ – the song that used to advertise Martini (‘any time, any place, anywhere’) in a haze of wah-wah pedal and 1970s hair? How about Dennis Potter’s sci-fi swansong Cold Lazarus, or more recently, the Bafta-winning Édith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose? Still no? Then picture David Suchet as ITV’s Poirot: and come on, surely you can already hear that smoky sax curling across the titles?

The man who composed Poirot also wrote one of the most original cycles of British symphonies

Anyway, the man who composed all those scores also wrote concertos for violin, cello, oboe and guitar – and one of the most original cycles of British symphonies since Malcolm Arnold. Christopher Gunning died last March aged 78, and it’s possible that we’re only just starting to appreciate what we’ve lost. Born in Cheltenham but raised in Metroland, Gunning trained with the symphonist Edmund Rubbra and the musical polymath Richard Rodney Bennett (still probably the only pupil of Pierre Boulez to have had a regular jazz piano gig at New York’s Algonquin Hotel).

A lucrative career in adverts and commercial arranging (he worked with Shirley Bassey and Cilla Black) led him to TV and the movies. And then, three years shy of his 60th birthday, he wrote his first symphony – and kept writing them: 13 in total, all created since the millennium 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.