Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 A debut
- 2 Berio
- 3 Paths to Montsalvat
- 4 Carter
- 5 Da lontano
- 6 Gubaidulina
- 7 A handful of pianists
- 8 Purcell 1995
- 9 Around New York
- 10 Tippett
- 11 Being in Assisi
- 12 Boulez
- 13 The composer's voice
- 14 Mozart 1991
- 15 A decade of Don Giovannis
- 16 Henze
- 17 Operatic passions
- 18 Vivier
- 19 At the movies
- 20 Schoenberg on the stage
- 21 Five British composers
- 22 Lachenmann
- 23 Mapping Mtsensk
- 24 Stockhausen
- 25 Behind the rusting Curtain
- 26 Verdi at the Met
- 27 A quintet of singers
- 28 Schnittke
- 29 How it was, maybe
- 30 Reich
- 31 Tracks in Allemonde
- 32 Birtwistle
- 33 A departure
- Further reading and listening
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 A debut
- 2 Berio
- 3 Paths to Montsalvat
- 4 Carter
- 5 Da lontano
- 6 Gubaidulina
- 7 A handful of pianists
- 8 Purcell 1995
- 9 Around New York
- 10 Tippett
- 11 Being in Assisi
- 12 Boulez
- 13 The composer's voice
- 14 Mozart 1991
- 15 A decade of Don Giovannis
- 16 Henze
- 17 Operatic passions
- 18 Vivier
- 19 At the movies
- 20 Schoenberg on the stage
- 21 Five British composers
- 22 Lachenmann
- 23 Mapping Mtsensk
- 24 Stockhausen
- 25 Behind the rusting Curtain
- 26 Verdi at the Met
- 27 A quintet of singers
- 28 Schnittke
- 29 How it was, maybe
- 30 Reich
- 31 Tracks in Allemonde
- 32 Birtwistle
- 33 A departure
- Further reading and listening
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
Creative into his late eighties, Michael Tippett was a heartening and colourful figure at performances and premieres, including those of his last opera, New Year (1986–8), and his setting of Yeats's Byzantium (1989–90). Farewells, when he died at the age of ninety-three, had to be celebratory.
New Year
Tippett keeps on getting younger. Just ten weeks from his eighty-fifth birthday, here he is in Texas, sportively bejeaned, taking a gentle bow after a work which, but for the modesty of the amplification and also of the scenic resources, would have to be called a rock opera. Saxophones wail, a large percussion group batters and jangles in urban syncopation, electric guitars squelch out disgust. A male vocalist, couched in an armchair with Budweiser and cigarettes, cynically leads and misleads us as master of these ceremonies. A chorus of louche modern types judders. At Houston Grand Opera it is New Year.
But it is also old Tippett, in that what we are probably to see as a black, bleak vision of the contemporary city is cracked by what we are probably to see as hope and love. It is the same story: it is most particularly the same story as The Midsummer Marriage, for though we are now at the opposite time of year, this is again the moment of collective celebration (so important to Tippett, this Greek ideal of the artist enjoining a public forum), out of which a young woman is kept by her anxieties and tightnesses.
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- Information
- The Substance of Things HeardWritings about Music, pp. 65 - 71Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005