New Age New Year

Tippett's enigmatic operatic swansong in Birmingham

From Nowhere and Tomorrow: Samantha Crawford (Regan) , Lucia Lucas (Merlin) Picture © Adam Fradgley

In 2015 Graham Vick, founder and artistic director of Birmingham Opera Company, achieved something I thought impossible: finally making sense of Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, The Ice Break, in a staging with professional soloists and orchestra, and a chorus and extras drawn entirely from local amateurs. I had missed the 1977 world premiere at Covent Garden, but I did see the revival of the original Sam Wanamaker production two years later. Brilliantly performed as it was, the experience left me wondering if I would ever see this strange opera again. Its first German production followed the year after London, and Opera Company of Boston gave its US premiere in 1979, but 36 years were to elapse before it was staged again.

Tippett’s operatic swansong, New Year, has waited nearly as long, 34 years, for a second UK staging since the first performance here at Glyndebourne in 1990, which I did see. Although, at its world premiere by Houston Grand Opera the previous year, New Year garnered respectful reviews from visiting British critics, American reviewers were less convinced, The New York Times alleging that the work “suffers seriously - fatally - from the weakness of the libretto”.

The question facing Birmingham Opera Company (BOC) in advance of its new staging was whether it could overcome this “fatal weakness” and somehow rehabilitate New Year to the same degree that it had done with The Ice Break in 2015.

At the Dream Tent, a temporary space not far from Birmingham’s Bullring Centre, we were left in no doubt of the extraordinary - yes, visionary - richness of a score composed when Tippett was in his mid eighties. Conducted by BOC music director Alpesh Chauhan, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra played the intricate music with complete conviction, showcasing Tippett’s fascination with the sounds of a huge contingent of percussion players. They also brought a rhythmic charge to the substantial dance music, which almost makes New Year a latter-day opera-ballet, with its pavane-like ‘courtly dance’ for the romantic heroine Jo Ann and hero Pelegrin, and a big solo for the spirit of Jo Ann’s troubled Rastafarian foster-brother Donny (danced by Shaun Cope).

Sakhiwe Mkosana (Donny), Sarah Pring (Nan) Picture © Adam Fradgley

The text for this futuristic ‘quest’ opera of self-discovery (echoes of The Magic Flute) may strike us today as obscure and dated, but Tippett’s music stands the test of time: this performance underlined how grateful his vocal writing is for soloists and chorus. Given that BOC’s chorus is predominantly amateur, this represented a colossal achievement for ‘community opera’ - something unique and special, vindicating Vick’s campaign to take opera out of traditional opera houses into alternative spaces.

Keith Warner had the unenviable task of assuming the mantle of Vick, who died in 2021, and yet his epic staging in the Dream Tent succeeded in emulating the visionary ‘happenings’ masterminded by BOC’s founder. At either end of the tent, designer Nicky Shaw had placed Jo Ann in a modest “see-through” home - back-lit to reveal the interior - and the computer wizard Merlin in a gleaming metallic spaceship - a kind of Chinese-box-cum-Tardis. In between these two polarities was a central platform where Jo Ann “from somewhere and today” meets the space-wanderer Pelegrin “from nowhere and tomorrow”. The two characters find each other amid the chaos of ‘Terror Town’, where the dispossessed run amok. With the arrival of the space travellers, there is the promise of a better future, and after the New Year celebrations of Act 2 (climaxing in the company singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, the familiarity of which comes as a shock), Jo Ann and Pelegrin duet rhapsodically, like a cosmic Tristan and Isolde. The final words are left to the enigmatic narrator or ‘Presenter’, here shared between two singers (Oskar McCarthy, Grace Durham): “One humanity, one justice”.

What to make of it all? It reminded me of the time I interviewed Tippett late in his life: when I played back the tape recording, to my horror I realised he never completed a sentence. What shone through his words then and - judging by BOC’s performance - what irradiates New Year now is Tippett’s passionate concern for humanity and justice, the same concern that made him a conscientious objector in the Second World War and a lifelong supporter of civil rights. It shines through his word-salad text and underpins the rich originality of the score, marvellously played by the CBSO. Chauhan mined it for every glint of precious metal while the percussion section revealed an aural kaleidoscope of sounds and rhythms that are entirely Tippett’s own.

Francesca Chiejina: soaring lyrical Jo Ann Picture © Adam Fradgley

The Birmingham soloists did the composer proud. Francesca Chiejina had the perfect, soaring lyric soprano for Jo Ann, blending ideally with Sarah Pring’s still sappy mezzo as Nan. Sakhiwe Mkosana delivered Donny’s street patois as convincingly as possible, while Oskar McCarthy’s Presenter sounded suitably familiar with the rap-style song-speech of his part. The intergalactic trio from Nowhere and Tomorrow, Joshua Stewart’s heroically sung Pelegrin, Lucia Lucas’s baritone Merlin and especially Samantha Crawford, riveting in the strange part of Regan, the time travellers’ leader made light work of their fiendishly difficult roles . No praise can be too high for the community chorus in music which must have taken them months to learn.

Whatever one’s reaction to the work itself, this performance was a powerful tribute to Vick’s vision and achievement.