LPO Release Revives Interest in Michael Tippett

Back in my adolescent days in the second half of the last century, I found myself part of a group that shared enthusiasm for “new music” from any number of different sources. Where the United Kingdom was concerned, one of those sources was Michael Tippett, a British composer whose life spanned almost the entire twentieth century. However, as that century passed, so did interest in Tippett’s compositions; and I am almost certain that I have never encountered his music in concert or recital since the end of 1999.

Recordings are another matter. Over the course of time, I have collected  CDs of all four of his symphonies and his two major oratorios, A Child of our Time and The Mask of Time. More recently, through my attempts to follow the BBC Legends anthologies, I found that the most recent release (which was almost exactly a year ago) included his concerto for double string orchestra with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rudolf Kempe. However, my encounters with both the symphonies and the oratorios took place before I began to begin writing about music seriously.

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of PIAS)

Tomorrow, the London Philharmonic Orchestra will release an all-Tippett album on their “house label.” For those too impatient to wait a day, Amazon.com has already created the Web page for this album, which is accepting pre-orders. Edward Gardner is the conductor; and pianist Steven Osborne is the soloist for the first selection on the album, Tippett’s only piano concerto. The remainder of the album presents his second symphony.

Listening to these selections reminded me of how, in the past, I had come to recognize and enjoy the “Tippett sound.” Perhaps through his experience with oratorios, one could follow rhetorical tropes over the course of his instrumental music. Mind you, the recordings I have of his symphonies had Colin Davis and Georg Solti as conductors, both of whom have always had a solid command of rhetoric; but that just means that they could not have been better qualified to do justice to Tippett’s efforts as a composer.

On this new album it is clear that both Gardner and Osborne have established a solid command of the “marks on paper.” Where the concerto is concerned, that involves negotiating many challenges in keyboard technique. Nevertheless, I was never particularly convinced by the expressiveness of performance, coming from either Osborne’s skillful keyboard work or Gardner’s oversight as a conductor.

I have previously cited the joke about the monorail as the “idea of the future whose time has passed;” and I wonder whether or not, in the context of the current century, Tippett’s time may also have passed.