Recording of the Week, Tippett's A Child of Our Time from the late Andrew Davis

With its searing depiction of the plight of refugees and heartfelt plea for peaceful co-existence, Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time (composed and premiered during World War Two) is a work which packs a strong emotional punch at the best of times, but there’s an additional poignancy to the new account on Chandos which lands today. The conductor Andrew Davis, who considered Tippett ‘up there with the greatest twentieth-century composers’, died just a fortnight ago and this studio recording (made in the days after a shattering live performance at the Barbican last May) now stands as the final entry in his diverse and distinguished discography.

Personally and professionally, composer and conductor got on like a house on fire, and over the course of his career Davis performed almost a third of Tippett’s output. In an eloquent, affectionate tribute to Davis’s special relationship with the man and his music last month, Tippett’s biographer Oliver Soden recounted how Davis had tackled some of the composer’s trickiest piano-parts whilst still a student and gone on to conduct the British premieres of his final opera New Year and the vast cantata The Mask of Time.

His near-lifelong immersion in Tippett’s music and his willingness to carve out significant swathes of time to digest its complexities are writ large in every phrase of this meticulous, lovingly-prepared account of his best-known work, in which precision never comes at the expense of emotional engagement or awareness of the bigger picture.

That precision is very much to the fore in the chilling opening section in which the chorus portentously announce that ‘The world has turned on its dark side’, with every tiny gradation in dynamics painstakingly observed and the edgy brass contrasting with a lush, 1940s-esque string sound that rather put me in mind of Sinfonia of London.If the BBC Symphony Chorus’s diction can be a tad cloudy in these early, hushed sections they certainly score highly on atmosphere here, collectively draining the colour from their sound in response to the text and sounding completely in command of Tippett’s often deliberately ungainly vocal lines. And their textual clarity sharpens dramatically in Part Two, especially in the ‘Double Chorus of the Persecutors and Persecuted’ when they spit out their imprecations with all the ferocity of the crowd in Bach’s Passions (one of Tippett’s inspirations for the piece).

Like his predecessors Colin Davis, Richard Hickox and Tippett himself (who recorded the piece in his 80s), Davis has enlisted a racially-diverse solo quartet to do justice to a work which deploys spirituals much as Bach utilised chorales in his Passions. American tenor Joshua Stewart is rightly the star of the show as the eponymous Child, singing with startling emotional directness and plenty of focus and colour throughout the range: his strangely radiant prison-scene in Part Two feels, as it should, like the beating heart of the work, and his contributions to the Part Three ensemble ‘I would know my shadow and my light’ are equally affecting. We should hear more of him on record, and soon. Sarah Connolly and Ashley Riches are both on top form, sounding completely inside the text and bringing edgy energy to their narrator-like roles.

Only the South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza seems slightly out of sorts at times, her tone sounding a little occluded until it opens out at the very top of the voice, though she brings great tenderness to ‘How shall I cherish my man in such days?’ and cuts through the ensemble in the closing pages to hair-raising effect.

The five spirituals are sensitively handled and beautifully shaped, with Davis mindful of Tippett’s mandate that they should be neither over-sentimentalised nor too clinical (and thankfully there’s no trace of the exaggerated AAVE pronunciation which often crept into twentieth-century performances by predominantly white choirs).

In short, the recording is a wonderful testimony to Davis’s affinity with Tippett’s music as well as a fine achievement in its own right. And for those who share my conviction that this composer’s rich and strange body of work is still under-represented on record, the world premiere recording of New Year is due for release on NMC in early 2025…