When the audience at Glyndebourne filed out of the first UK production of Michael Tippett’s New Year in 1990, there were mystified looks. A Tippett opera could be guaranteed to be a uniquely personal statement, but the phrase on everybody’s lips was, “Whatever was that about?”.
New Year, the last of Tippett’s five operas, has never caught on and a recording has been a long time coming. Now Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have ridden to the rescue with this live recording of a concert performance in Glasgow.
Even composing in his eighties, Tippett was keen to keep up with the latest trends. New Year must rank as the first British multicultural opera and its philosophising dreamscape involves time-travel, spaceships and a prescient plea for “One humanity; one justice”. Tippett’s heart was always in the right place.
Set aside the tortuous libretto (Tippett liked to write his own) and just listen to the music. Electric guitars and saxophones add piquancy to an eclectic score, in which opera embraces jazz and rock. Magical interludes, sometimes involving otherworldly electronics, conjure changes of time and space.
This fine recording captures all of that with clarity and features a fine cast, led by Rhian Lois, Robert Murray and Ross Ramgobin, the latter in a very eyebrow-raising role as a Caribbean teenager — which now appears as an embarrassing racial stereotype. Problems notwithstanding, a previously unrecorded Tippett opera is an important event. NMC has risen superbly to the occasion.
★★★☆☆
‘Tippett: New Year’ is released by NMC