Tippett, Michael Kemp (1905 - 98)

[Pulcinella]

The first movement of the second symphony's world premiere performance under Boult (not including the collapse, so presumably once he started again) is available here:

https://www.pristineclassical.com/products/pasc460

(Picked up from the What are you listening to now thread.)

[Richard Barrett]

Now playing (for the third time today): the LSO and Simon Rattle performing Tippett's The Rose Lake, courtesy of HighlandDougie and Bryn. (I haven't listened to the other piece in the concert, the Mahler/Cooke 10th Symphony, because I reckon I pretty much know SR's thoughts on that.) The orchestral virtuosity is, excepting a very few small lapses, at the high level SR is getting the LSO to play at; it seems to me already a more fitting partnership than his previous position. Everything is bright and vivid in a way that makes me think that I hadn't really got what this piece really consists of in the recordings already released. Appropriately I'm just coming to the end of Oliver Soden's Tippett biography, which I've been very impressed by. He doesn't say that much about the music, but what he does say is very articulate and suggestive and finely judged, and just enough to encourage the reader to go back to the music and to be reminded that this is the main point of the exercise. My admiration for MT and his work, already high and deep-seated, has increased as a result of reading this book. It makes me sorry not to have met him, which would have been an easy thing to arrange given the numbers of people we had in common. I don't expect the book will do that much to counter the neglect this music currently suffers, but it certainly makes clear that it deserves to be brought back to the kind of position in musical life it used to have half a century ago. The way people now talk about pieces like The Knot Garden makes it quite startling to learn what a successful work it was when first performed.

[BBMmk2]

The Rose Lake, I think has to be my favourite Tippett work.

[Richard Barrett]

It's nice that Soden ends his book not with Tippett's death but with an assessment of his musical oeuvre as a whole, one which I find largely coincides with my own feelings, particularly in its refusal to follow received opinions on the later works, especially the operas and their libretti, and its placing the Third Symphony as possibly MT's masterpiece. There's also a note on recordings, which mentions two deleted BBC recordings mentioned earlier in this thread in a way that makes it urgent that I hear them as soon as possible! - the aforementioned work with Josephine Barstow, and also one of the Vision of St Augustine.

Anyway I recommend this book very highly. Like all biographies of composers it has the problem that large amounts of composers' lives are spent sitting at a desk and not doing anything outwardly interesting, but its placing of MT's thought in its social, political and personal context is highly valuable not just in deepening one's understanding of his music but also in contributing to more wide-ranging discourses, about pacifism and sexuality, the role of artists in society, and indeed how biography should/could be written.

[ahinton]

It's nice that Soden ends his book not with Tippett's death but with an assessment of his musical oeuvre as a whole, one which I find largely coincides with my own feelings, particularly in its refusal to follow received opinions on the later works, especially the operas and their libretti, and its placing the Third Symphony as possibly MT's masterpiece. There's also a note on recordings, which mentions two deleted BBC recordings mentioned earlier in this thread in a way that makes it urgent that I hear them as soon as possible! - the aforementioned work with Josephine Barstow, and also one of the Vision of St Augustine.

Anyway I recommend this book very highly. Like all biographies of composers it has the problem that large amounts of composers' lives are spent sitting at a desk and not doing anything outwardly interesting, but its placing of MT's thought in its social, political and personal context is highly valuable not just in deepening one's understanding of his music but also in contributing to more wide-ranging discourses, about pacifism and sexuality, the role of artists in society, and indeed how biography should/could be written.

Good to read so glowing and thoughtful an endorsement of this new book on one of the most important English composers of the past century. That Tippett's work seems to have suffered the neglect that it has since his death has always perplexed me. it seems to me that Vision of St. Augustine has never elicited the appreciaion that it deserves, even during the composer's lifetime. I really will have to revisit the Third Symphony, to which I've not listened in a long time and which I've never managed to "get" (some glorious passages notwithstanding).

I note also that Oliver Soden was the producer of the excellent recent John Bridcut film about Janet Baker.

[silvestrione]

For me the best Tippett is the 2nd and 4th Symphonies, the Vision of St Augustine, and the Triple Concerto. The early(ish) Concerto for Double String orchestra is an obvious classic, I would have thought, of that genre of English music for strings, and A Child of Our Time, ditto, in the English choral tradition (uneven as it is). Years ago I was infatuated with Midsummer Marriage and Symphony 3 and The Mask of Time, but it passed, and it's very difficult to get clear about something again, in those circumstances! I listened to Sym 3 recently and began to feel I was wrong to think it did not build up to a whole: in the current climate especially, I suspect I'm going to increasingly find it a powerful and moving work.

I think the BBC recording of V of St A better than Tippett's own! He doesn't get the chorus to bring out the climactic words/sounds effectively enough, for me.

[silvestrione]

Rattle is a fine Tippett conductor, I think. I have a treasured off-air version of Sym 4 , with CBSO. I just wish he wasn't so keen on The Rose Lake, which, for me, always feels thin on real musical substance.

[Pulcinella]

I'm sure that I've mentioned elsewhere (perhaps even upthread) that the original RCA LP release of Vision came handsomely presented in a sturdy box which also contained a (free) copy of the study score: an extraordinary bit of promotion.

Tippett signed my copy after a concert he gave with the RLPO in Liverpool: a treasured possession. He seemed a little surprised that I had a copy, until I reminded him of its provenance.

As far as I know, the coupling on that LP, a version of the Handel Fantasia with a rather clangy piano, if memory serves, has not made it to CD, but at least we have versions by Shelley and Osborne. I think it deserves to be better known, and more widely performed, but perhaps it doesn't fit that readily in a concert programme.

[Richard Barrett]

Rattle is a fine Tippett conductor, I think. I have a treasured off-air version of Sym 4 , with CBSO. I just wish he wasn't so keen on The Rose Lake, which, for me, always feels thin on real musical substance.

I don't think it comes over that way in the broadcast recording. To me it shows a composer still exploring new territory at an age when most composers who've survived that long are taking things easy. Should its episodic form and sparser textures be interpreted as a thinness in "real musical substance"? Nevertheless I agree that SR would do well to delve deeper into Tippett's oeuvre.

[silvestrione]

I don't think it comes over that way in the broadcast recording. To me it shows a composer still exploring new territory at an age when most composers who've survived that long are taking things easy. Should its episodic form and sparser textures be interpreted as a thinness in "real musical substance"? Nevertheless I agree that SR would do well to delve deeper into Tippett's oeuvre.

Well I've had another listen (to The Rose Lake) and I still don't like it, but I guess that's just me. Of course you are right, it's a tribute to Tippett ('Old men should be explorers' - he would know the T.S. Eliot quote!) that he is exploring new territory. I'm jealous I think, of the attention the work is getting ahead of what I think of as much more deserving pieces, such as the Triple Concerto (so much more inventive in its gamelan effects) and the Concerto for Orchestra (which 'dances as it sings', as Wifrid Mellers said once: the rhythms in Rose Lake just aren't alive in the same way).

[Richard Barrett]

Of course you are right, it's a tribute to Tippett ('Old men should be explorers' - he would know the T.S. Eliot quote!) that he is exploring new territory. I'm jealous I think, of the attention the work is getting ahead of what I think of as much more deserving pieces, such as the Triple Concerto (so much more inventive in its gamelan effects) and the Concerto for Orchestra (which 'dances as it sings', as Wifrid Mellers said once: the rhythms in Rose Lake just aren't alive in the same way).

I love both of those pieces and I agree that they should be given more attention, but then Tippett's work in general has fallen into neglect in recent years, aided and abetted by people like the egregious Lebrecht ("a composer to forget").

[Maclintick]

Good to read so glowing and thoughtful an endorsement of this new book on one of the most important English composers of the past century. That Tippett's work seems to have suffered the neglect that it has since his death has always perplexed me. it seems to me that Vision of St. Augustine has never elicited the appreciaion that it deserves, even during the composer's lifetime. I really will have to revisit the Third Symphony, to which I've not listened in a long time and which I've never managed to "get" (some glorious passages notwithstanding).

Just finished Oliver Soden’s thoroughly recommendable biog - & it’s left me with almost as much admiration for OS’s meticulous and painstaking research - scholarly & judicious with over a hundred pages of annotations - as for MT’s decades of unremitting slog as a composer and political activist. The striking contrast between contemporaneous evaluations of Tippett’s oeuvre and negative posthumous judgements are laid bare by Soden, who largely overturns the view that MT's later works were indifferently received (esp. the operas) during his lifetime, & gives compelling reasons for their relative neglect since -- the inherent difficulty for performers, the expense, plus MT's refusal, with typical generosity, to allow promotion of his own works by the Michael Tippett Foundation, so that young composers could benefit. Fortunately, there are signs that this situation is now improving with recent performances & recordings of the symphonies, & The Rose Lake. The operas may take longer...

I have no patience with those who would use Tippett as a stick with which to beat Britten and vice-versa, but I think the comments Soden quotes of Josephine Barstow after the success of The Knot Garden are significant in this context -- I paraphrase, but those interested can find the quote on p.530 -- Barstow says that at the time (1970) there was a general feeling among musicians of Tippett's superiority to Britten which she describes as "snobbery" towards the latter, who was perceived as producing merely "commercial" pieces, coupled with a concomitant belief that Tippett's operatic oeuvre would outlast BB's. Soden quotes her wry observation that the reverse has happened since.

MT’s voluminous, volatile and voluble letters give a good sense of the man, their untrammelled exuberance occasionally verging on the indecipherable, shorn of their intimate contexts. Here a short course in Jungian analysis might help the reader, but there's no denying the great intelligence, humanity and charm, as all who met him would aver (I did on several occasions in his late "giggly" phase, as his publisher at Schott Sally Groves characterises it ).

We owe Oliver Soden a debt of gratitude for this significant book, but if I have a minor caveat it's that the author is rather unforgiving towards Isabel Kemp (MT's mother), an energetic and committed suffragist who proudly wore her sisterhood's badge of honour --imprisonment in Holloway, in a way which clearly foreshadows MT's later sojourn in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector. While Soden doesn't quite say that she should have stayed at home & looked after the kids, his description of her "overweening do-goodism" is unfortunate.

[Richard Barrett]

a concomitant belief that Tippett's operatic oeuvre would outlast BB's. Soden quotes her wry observation that the reverse has happened since.

So far!

[ahinton]

I love both of those pieces and I agree that they should be given more attention, but then Tippett's work in general has fallen into neglect in recent years, aided and abetted by people like the egregious Lebrecht ("a composer to forget").

What on earth does the egregious NL think that he's talking about? "A composer to forget"? By whom? And why? If NL had ever written a bar of the order of the best of Tippett at any point in his creative career, he might just have had something to say that could be worth reading / listening to. He didn't. So he doesn't.

[zola]

Oliver Soden is in conversation with William Mival at the RCM on October 31st, talking about Tippett. There will also be some chamber music. Nothing else happening on October 31st is there ?

https://www.rcm.ac.uk/events/details/?id=1789568

Also LSO St Luke's are hosting a series of Radio 3 lunchtime recitals with a Tippett theme through October and November that will turn up on R3 at some point.