The composer Christopher Gunning, who has died aged 78 of renal cancer, operated with equal assurance in both the film and television world and the classical symphonic tradition. The music for which he is most widely known is that for ITV’s long-running series Agatha Christie’s Poirot, starring David Suchet, for which he won a Bafta in 1989 and created incidental music for some 40 of the episodes.
Gunning recalled that he wrote three candidate melodies for the ubiquitous signature tune for the producer Brian Eastman to consider; the third option was picked as best combining the spirit of the late 1920s and 30s with the slightly darker side of the Belgian detective’s character. The theme was played by the jazz saxophonist Stan Sulzmann in numerous variations across the series.
In the 1979s Gunning had found success writing music for advertising, including the global Martini campaign (“the Right One”), for which he won three Clio awards, and Black Magic chocolates. From the 80s to 2014, he composed music for many successful TV productions and films.
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.
Born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Christopher was the son of Alexis, a South African-born pianist and teacher, and Janet (nee Bennett), who had been Alexis’s pupil; the family later moved to Hendon, north-west London. Growing up with his older brother and sister in a small semi-detached house surrounded by music, Christopher began composing at an early age, even before he could properly read music. He was educated at Hendon County grammar school and went on to study composition, piano and percussion at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where his tutors included Sir Richard Rodney Bennett , Edmund Rubbra and the musicologist Brian Trowell.
Gunning’s broad approach to composition followed Bennett’s example, whose works included three symphonies and a piano concerto, plus the hugely successful score for Murder on the Orient Express; he was also a noted jazz pianist. When Gunning was in his 20s, the pair collaborated on the music for the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra.
Gunning held no formal academic teaching posts, but was an outspoken champion for composers’ rights within the PRS. In addition to his Baftas, he won three Ivor Novello awards, for Under Suspicion (1991), the TV mini-series Rebecca (1997) and Firelight.
In 1974, he married Annie Farrow, then managing director of the Air-Edel music agency, with whom he had four daughters, Olivia, Pollyanna (a recorder player who appeared in recordings of her father’s music), Verity and Chloë. The marriage was dissolved in 1999. In 2004, Gunning married Svitlana Sainko.
He is survived by Svitlana, his four children and five grandchildren.
