Tag Archives: Michael Tippett

BBC SSO / Sanderling

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City Halls, Glasgow

It is more common, fortunately, that a concert whose immediate charms are not obvious on paper turns out to have a rich subtext and surprising programmatic connections, whether or not they were intended at the event’s conception. Regrettably the opposite turned out to be the case with Thursday’s season concert by the BBC Scottish, which will be repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Sunday afternoon.

What seemed a hit programme started well enough, with a stirring account of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Michael Sanderling conducting the SSO brass, horns and percussion through the disciplined explosion of the music the composer later incorporated into his Third Symphony. Rich-toned and precise here, it is irresistible as a punchy stand-alone and as fine a concert-opener as one might wish to hear, but also a difficult act to follow.

That task fell to Ethan Loch, BBC Young Musician finalist in 2022 and a now a student at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire. Blind from birth, Loch’s ambitions embrace composition and improvisation – both of which would be demonstrated in his encores – but his recital piece here was Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2. Composed before his first numbered concerto, when Chopin was still (just) in his teens, it is a young man’s work, the solo part a virtuoso showpiece and the orchestral writing often thought wanting experience.

Those strengths and deficiencies need not be apparent – the recent RSNO recording with Benjamin Grosvenor under the baton of Elim Cham makes an eloquent argument for both concertos – but they were here. Sanderling gave the 20-year-old pianist the best platform by keeping the orchestra on a tight rein, but Loch’s playing, while accurate and technically secure, was often a little heavy-handed. When the left hand was steadier, in the central Larghetto especially, the increasingly elaborate right hand was more expressive, but the finale lacked the dancing sprightliness it really requires.

For all its melodic riches, there was something slightly lumpen about Sanderling’s account of Dvorak’s New World symphony as well. The SSO strings sounded thicker than usual and the conductor’s tempi seemed very deliberate. There was some fine playing from the winds – Stella McCracken’s oboe and Yann Ghiro’s clarinet in particular – but the fanfare at the start of the last movement failed to give that final theme quite the propulsion it required.

Having said all that, there were clearly many in the very full house who shared few of those reservations, and the box-office appeal of the programme will doubtless work its magic for ticket sales in Edinburgh too.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Michael Sanderling by Marco Borggreve

Tippett: New Year

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City Halls, Glasgow

It would be premature, in truth ill-informed, to assess the BBC SSO’s concert-style revival of Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year, as creating a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. For how many of us have actually witnessed this bizarre work in its fully-staged totality? Completed by the ailing septuagenarian Tippett in the late 1980s, it was only ever subject to one staged production, by Peter Hall, with performances in Houston Texas in 1989, transferring to Glyndebourne, then in a modified form by Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Since then, nothing.

What Saturday’s semi-staging by Victoria Newlyn offered was just one facet of the whole – the musical score – predicated on the fact that NMC, as partners to the event, were usefully recording it to create the first commercial recording of New Year. It will be available, rather conveniently, “early in the new year”.

The issue arising from this sharp-edged Glasgow performance, in which the SSO under Martyn Brabbins were joined by a dedicated cast and the BBC Singers, was not so much what we did hear, as what we didn’t see. 

It’s a plot you need regular help with: a tale of two worlds colliding, the urban banality of “Somewhere and Today” and the utopian “Nowhere and Tomorrow” somewhere in space, constructed by Tippett in naively futuristic Wellsian terms. The literal interaction between the two sets of beings – an earthly trio rescued from dysfunction by an otherworldly trio of spaceship travellers – is puzzling enough, but not to witness the actual physicality of the substantial, presumably pivotal, dance scenes leaves the full visual impact of Tippett’s fantasy concept incomplete.

As for the music, this has to rank, if not quite the rantings of an elderly esoteric composer, as an impatiently wild and cathartic compositional exorcism. There’s no limit to the juxtapositional chaos of clashing styles – moments of gorgeous post-pastoral Englishness thrown to the wind by the intervention of crunching 20th century dissonance; the lugubrious twang of an electric guitar enlivened by the onslaught of rap and reggae; the electronic datedness – Blake’s 7-style – of the space ship sound effects; even a stirring Ne’erday chorus of Auld Lang Syne shredded by scintillatingly combatant counterpoints. 

What Brabbins did so successfully was to masterfully harness such fragmentations, making energetic sense of it in the same way a good Bernstein Mass performance makes sense of its stylistic incongruences. He was abetted fully by a trusty cast. Alan Oke – a one-time regular with Scottish Opera in the 1980s – commanded a stentorian central presence as the Presenter; soprano Rhian Lois sang powerfully and alluringly as the chief protagonist Jo Ann, Ross Ramgobin somewhat gauche as her Afro-Caribbean foster brother Donny. Foster mother Susan Bickley bore a stirringly stoical countenance.

The white suited time-travellers offered a potent contrast – Roland Wood typically imposing as computer wizard Merlin; Robert Murray lustrously impassioned as space pilot Pelegrin; with their boss Rachel Nicholls’ radiant soprano powering through, exhilaratingly so. The BBC Singers contributed animated rearguard support. 

For all its crazy merits though, including the nostalgic aura of what is essentially mood music and sound effects of the time, this experience constantly felt as if it were one dimension short. If New Year is already a silk purse, we need full theatrical proof. Anyone keen to test that might be tempted by Keith Warner’s new production for Birmingham Opera Company opening this July. The conductor is another SSO regular, Alpesh Chauhan. 

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available via BBC Sounds for 30 days

EIF: Child of Our Time / Davis

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

While the bulk of Sunday’s Usher Hall audience will have known what to expect with Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, fewer will have been familiar with his Concerto for Orchestra. This pairing constituted an intriguing snapshot into the 20th century English composer’s complex, personalised sound world, delivered consummately under the seasoned baton of Sir Andrew Davis.

The former, a stirring 1940s wartime response to human violence and oppression, ranks among the composer’s few instantly-accessible pieces, notable for its thrilling climactic use of Black American Spirituals, their spine-tingling harmonies and tearful pathos. 

The Concerto, however, is later Tippett – commissioned for, and premiered at, the 1963 Edinburgh Festival – the language by then more testing and austere, the milder dissonant complexion of Child of Our Time consigned to the past. Yet, as these engaging performances illustrated, a commonality persists – an elusive, mystical personality arising from complex objectivity. In other words, a consistent and recognisable musical voice.

Davis knew instinctively how to extract that personality from the RSNO in the orchestral opener, serving up exactly what it says on the tin, a concerto for orchestra, in which no-one gets an easy ride. It played out like a quick-fire conversational theatre piece, multi-layered characterisations ricocheting off each other with unceasing changeability. It featured delicious solos for flute, cello, even timpani, and sparky ensemble cameos – a parping tuba paired with piano, for instance – but also a concealed lyrical thread that formed a cohesive backbone to this fascinating, iridescent work.

That same unyielding determination fed through A Child of Our Time, Davis calmly in charge, but generating, through judicious pacing, an organic sense of the epic. The Festival Chorus took their lead accordingly, solid as a rock, openly expressive – especially in the unison singing – but sensitive, too, in shaping the big picture. Within the solo quartet, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha’s soprano was an exuberant foil to Dame Sarah Connolly’s burnished mezzo, tenor Russell Thomas and bass Michael Mofidian equally generous as a pairing. As a complete team they were resplendent. Once again the RSNO were faultless. 

The outright winner, of course, was Tippett, so often maligned and misunderstood – not unreasonably in certain cases – but reconfirmed here as a legitimate and unique voice in what was a turbulent, sometimes unfriendly, 20th century musical landscape.

Ken Walton