TIPPETT: A Child of Our Time

Cheek, John, City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Garrison, Jon, Halsey, Simon, Robinson, Faye, Tippett, Michael, Walker, Sarah

8.557570

The music of A Child of Our Time similarly reconciles and integrates apparent opposites. The overall form of the work, the composer himself said, recalls the tripartite arrangement of Handel’s Messiah, in which the first part consists of ‘great but general prophecies’, the second of narrative, and the third of ‘commentary and judgment’. Within this framework, there are more specific reminiscences of Handel’s oratorios and of Bach’s Passion settings, in such things as the dual rôles of the soloists as characters in the drama and commentators, the choral ‘crowd scenes’, among them the double chorus of persecutors and persecuted in Part Two, the frequent use of fugal texture, the constantly varying instrumental colours of successive numbers or sections, and most obviously the familiar first-inversion chords which herald the solo bass’s passages of narrative recitative. But the musical language of the work is by no means pastiche: it is Tippett’s own, recognisably English, especially in its madrigal-like adherence to the natural stresses of the words against the underlying pulse, and coloured by echoes of jazz and popular music such as the tango rhythm of the tenor’s ‘I have no money for my bread’. These go halfway to meet one of the most striking features of the work, the Negro spirituals which are introduced from time to time to comment on the actions and emotions of the drama, in the same way as the Lutheran chorales in Bach’s Passions. The spirituals are included as the songs of the victims of oppression in another generation and on another continent, and through their very familiarity they emphasize the relevance to us of the events Tippett describes and comments on: more than sixty years later, the anguished boy is still ‘a child of our time’.

CD

Naxos

3.01.2005

747313257027