A Child of Our Time
$25.00
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MICHAEL TIPPETT
A Child of Our Time
Faye Robinson, Sarah Walker, Jon Garrison & John Cheek / City of Birmingham Chorus & City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sir Michael Tippett
[ Naxos / CD ]
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This unique recording was conducted by Sir Michael Tippett himself when he was 85. It is thus a wonderful testament to one of great figures of British music of the twentieth century and very fitting that it should be once again in circulation during the centenary year
"The centenary of Sir Michael Tippett's birth saw a fair amount of critical agonising about whether he was, any longer, a composer for our time, or whether his time had passed. It's difficult to find much substance in that viewpoint when confronted with a work, first performed in 1944, which seems to have more in common with John Adams's much-admired ElNiño of 2000 than with Belshazzar's Feast, or even the War Requiem. The starkness of the confrontations in A Child of our Time between politics and psychology, between a high-art style rooted in Bach and a more popular, folktinged manner (the tango, Negro Spirituals), remains vivid, as does the sense of a composer doggedly carving out a viably personal idiom while not shirking matters of burning social and spiritual relevance. Maybe the focus wavers in places but the accumulated dramatic power, and its double release, first in a magical vision of spring, then in a more anxious, uncertain cry for peace and reconciliation, isn't something a bumbling amateur could have brought off.
Tippett was 87 when this recording was made, and neither its rhythmic momentum nor its textural clarity are ideal. But the composer's own lovingly crafted reading has a special place in the discography of this still-modern masterpiece." Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010
