Tippett: 5 Spirituals from "A Child of our Time" - Sunday a.m. 8.1.12

[LeMartinPecheur]

This morning I heard the Tippett Spirituals in a performance by Christ Church Cathedral Choir under - I think - Stephen Darlington. My reaction was of mingled pleasure and disquiet. Pleasure at the remarkably fine singing, including the boy chorister taking the soprano solo.

Aye, there's the rub - the disquiet stemmed from the feeling that this is absolutely not a work for children, or more particularly the remote purity of a boy chorister: it needs adult, sinful, passionate, grieving voices. Anyone else hit the same buffers??

I missed the promised revamp of these wonderful pieces on The Choir this evening. Probably wouldn't have gone looking for it even if I'd had the chance. Did it add anything, or wreck them?

[kernelbogey]

Bonjour, LMP! I half heard these while doing other things, and found myself reflecting that whenever I hear Tippett's spirituals, they sound wrong to me. They come, as Mercia says, from labourers' (slaves' actually) singing, and the Tippett always sounds somehow sanitised, bourgeois. Perhaps you will say there is a recorded version which would overcome my objection.

(Very irrerverrently, I'm also slightly reminded of the scene in Blazing Saddles when the chain gang sings a close harmony version of 'I get No Kicks from Champagne'.)

[LeMartinPecheur]

Thanks Mercia and Kernel B for your comments, even if I don't agree at all! I just love what MT does with the the Spirituals, always have, so I don't go as far as insisting on labourers (though no doubt Tippett would have been highly delighted at a labourers' choir doing them) and certainly don't find them "sanitised, bourgeois".

Perhaps I'm a bit fussy about performances of this work. The one I bought on LP (of the 5 Spirituals as a work apart from "A Child...") was on Oiseau-Lyre by the Oxford Bach Choir c1978 under Nicholas Cleobury. Very good except for the most utterly even, bland, uninflected, molto legato, passionless baritone solo in 'Go down Moses'!

And while on the subject of duff perfomances of this work, I've just discovered that I own that Christ Church/ Darlington one, in a cheapo Nimbus box set of miscellaneous Tippett

Time I bought myself a really good one with mixed choir then! Recommendations anybody??

[DracoM]

So your reaction to the version that turned up on The Choir??

Pretty unremarkable, run of the mill, technically sound, and in fact in the end banal. Sort of thing an arranger does for singers doing jazz standards.
OR
a work of some ingenuity that made us listen to the original Tippett again
OR
a work that crushed the Tippett and did it a grave disservice?

[rauschwerk]

In his notes to the Oxford Schola Cantorum recording (1977) Tippett explains that it took a lot of persuasion from his publisher to take these pieces out of context and make a cappella arrangements. He did the arrangements in 1958 but did not hear them until that recording session. Then "I realised that the sound of these songs when sung thus is quite different from their original settings in the oratorio." And so, he might have added, is the emotional impact.

[meles]

I heard that, and thought it somehow not persuasive. I have the old Colin Davis recording, which I always find moving.