Tag Archives: tippett

A life-long engagement with Tippett

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childofourtimeThe late Sir Andrew Davis was a life-long advocate for the music of Sir Michael Tippett so it’s fitting that one of his last recordings (perhaps the last?) should be of that composer’s A Child of Our Time.  It’s an unusual piece in many ways.  It’s an oratorio for solo quartet, chorus and orchestra and its structure reflects both Messiah and the Bach Passions.  The subject matter is anti-Semitism in Germany as a specific example of “man’s inhumanity to man” more generally. 

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Where there’s a Will

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So the Toronto Summer Music Festival continued last night with a Shakespeare themed show called A Shakespeare Serenade.  Curated and directed by Patrick Hansen of McGill it fell into two parts.  Before the interval we got Shakespeare scenes acted out and then the equivalent scene from an operatic adaptation of the play.  After the interval it was a mix of Sonnets and song settings in an overall staging that was perhaps riffing off The Decameron.  Patrick Hansen and Michael Shannon alternated at the piano.

Shakespeare-45

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War in opera

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As November 11th comes around for the 94th time since the guns were, very temporarily, silenced I thought it might be interesting to look at how war has been seen by librettists and composers over the years. Very early on we get a very gritty take on the subject in Monteverdi’s extremely compact Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda but not so long after the path for the next three centuries is set with Purcell’s broadly comic King Arthur.  As far as I can see from Purcell to 1945, with very minor exceptions, the message is largely “war is fun”.  War is an excuse for a big parade (Aida; unless Tim Albery is directing!), an excuse for a drinking song (Faust), just plain comedic (La Fille du Regiment), a plot device (Cosí fan tutte) or a background event (Tosca, various versions of the Armida story).  The only opera, pre 1945, that I can think of that deals with the horror of war is Les Troyens, and that of course takes place in a distant, mythical, past.

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