Tippett: Piano Concerto; Symphony No 2 album assessment – the vitality of the music is irrepressible | Classical music

The completion in 1952 of The Midsummer Marriage, his first opera, had marked a watershed in Michael Tippett’s growth. The works that adopted within the Fifties moved regularly away from the opera’s super-abundant lyricism in direction of a a lot leaner, extra abrasive language, and two of Tippett’s best orchestral works, the Piano Concerto, composed between 1953 and 1955, and the Second Symphony, which adopted two years later, marked essential phases in that stylistic shift.

Neither is among the many finest identified of Tippett’s works. There’s a handful of recorded variations of every, together with an earlier model of the concerto with Steven Osborne as soloist, and one of many performances of the symphony carried out by Tippett himself. However introduced collectively in these first-rate accounts from live shows that Edward Gardner carried out in London’s Royal Pageant Corridor in 2023 (the concerto) and 2024, the 2 works deliver the shifts in Tippett’s musical language into sharp focus. Even within the piano concerto the lyrical episodes have a tough crystalline edge, and even that has virtually fully disappeared within the symphony.

The recorded steadiness between the piano and the orchestra isn’t all the time supreme; it’s the solo flute relatively than the piano that dominates the opening bars, and there are a number of later moments when Osborne’s splendidly crisp, lucid taking part in isn’t as far ahead because it could be. However in any other case the concerto teems with element, and within the finale – a remaining look again to The Midsummer Marriage’s Ritual Dances – the vitality of the music is irrepressible, simply because the pounding rhythms and intricately meshing string-writing of the Second Symphony (arguably essentially the most coherent of Tippett’s works within the type) are fantastically delivered by Gardner and his orchestra.

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