Interview, Martyn Brabbins on Michael Tippett's New Year

Premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1989, Michael Tippett's weird and wonderful final opera New Year centres on an anxiety-ridden child psychologist, her Rastafarian foster-brother, and her transformative encounter with a space-ship bearing 'computer wizard' Merlin and pilot Pelegrin (with whom she falls in love).

Following a semi-staged performance in Glasgow last April, the first complete recording of the opera will be released on NMC this coming Friday, conducted by Martyn Brabbins and featuring Rhian Lois as Jo Ann, Ross Ramgobin as Donny, and Roland Wood, Robert Murray and Rachel Nicholls as their intergalactic visitors.

I spoke to Martyn Brabbins last month about Tippett's personality and legacy, the logistics of pulling together a soundworld which incorporates reggae, rap, rock and ska, why he believes that Tippett has been perhaps unfairly eclipsed by his younger contemporary Benjamin Britten, and his hopes that the recording might encourage more opera-companies to take up the challenge of staging the work following Birmingham Opera Company's production last summer...

First of all, thank you! Like many Tippett admirers I'd only ever heard the orchestral suite from New Year until very recently, and it's wonderful to have a recording of the complete opera at long last...

This is the final opera of a really significant composer, and I thought it was a crying shame that it hadn’t been recorded before - but I’m delighted to have been the one that pushed and got this project to happen. It was a very intense week of work, but there’s no question that everybody was in awe and wonder at the creativity which the piece encapsulates. The weirdness, wackiness and incoherence of the plot (if we call it a plot!) probably troubled some people who came along expecting a more conventional operatic experience, but those of us involved were so excited by the whole thing. It was wonderful to see the piece come back to life after all these years, and amazing that Birmingham Opera Company staged it just a few months later: let’s hope it’s not another thirty years before anyone does it again! 

Did you get to spend much time with Tippett towards the end of his life?

I mostly admired him from a distance. I did some projects around his pieces with the Nash Ensemble at the South Bank followed by a few Proms performances, then was lucky enough to have a couple of meetings with the man himself. He was an eccentrically charming, very open-hearted individual – I remember lots of kisses! And I’ve always felt that those personal qualities come across very strongly in his music, too: there’s an honesty and openness about it that’s just captivating. 

Although some of the soundworld is very much rooted in 1990s culture, I was struck by how strongly New Year speaks to social issues which we’re still grappling with today…

Absolutely. He was a visionary, wasn’t he? Tippett didn’t shy away from the emotional, intellectual and psychological challenges which everybody faced during his lifetime, and sadly most of those challenges haven’t gone away: they’ve just evolved a little bit in line with youth culture and current political events. I think Tippett was acutely aware that these issues would still be with us decades later...so yes, I think the word ‘visionary’ definitely applies to him, possibly more than to any other British composer of the twentieth century.

Did you feel that certain elements of the score - particularly the rap and reggae influences - had perhaps aged rather less well than others, or simply proved challenging to integrate on a recording?

It’s incredible that he was still so interested in contemporary youth culture at the very end of his life, and that’s all part of what we have to embrace and recreate in New Year. The inclusion of rap and reggae within an opera is pretty unusual, but when one conducts any contemporary music there are often new challenges. In all honesty the rap section did feel like the most awkward passage in the piece, and we thought long and hard about what we could do to make it work. 

The text itself is very much of its time, and there was a lot of careful consideration about how best to handle that – if Tippett were writing this now perhaps he wouldn’t have used some of the language he did in the 1990s, and we ran it past lots of sensitivity-readers at the BBC to gauge whether we should leave it as it is or alter some of the vocabulary. In the end we decided to present it as an historical document and let people take it at face value.

Incorporating the electric guitars was another challenge, especially in terms of dealing with their amplification. Fortunately, we had someone who’d experienced it the first time round: the wonderful guitarist Steve Smith actually played in the premiere, and was able to tell us exactly what kind of effect Tippett was after.

Then there’s the family of saxes, which is a fantastic addition to this particular score. Saxes can sometimes sound incongruous in orchestral contexts but in this soundworld they felt absolutely natural: Tippett sees them not as an exotic extra but an integral part of the whole.

And of course there’s the massive battery of percussion…That’s pretty common in music of the late twentieth century, but Tippett uses it in such a fun way: the guy on the drumkit had an absolute ball! It felt as though everybody involved kind of realised that we were resurrecting something really quite special that really deserves to be heard in its entirety.

Aside from the less conventional elements which he throws into the mix, there’s so much sheer sonic beauty in the orchestral writing - how exactly does he achieve that?

I absolutely agree with you there – there’s an ecstatic quality to much of the orchestration, and I think a lot of that comes from the string writing. New Year uses a very small string section, perhaps because Tippett was aware that Glyndebourne On Tour would be taking it to venues where there were restrictions on the size of the orchestra: we had just two desks of players on each part, and a pair of double basses. The string parts are very minimal throughout the piece, but they’re used very cleverly and exotically at times.

But the focal point of the scoring is much more coloristic. There’s that wonderful passage for the three flutes and the three saxophones, plus some incredible writing for the trumpets, trombones and horns. Tippett always wrote brilliantly for every group of instruments, and as an ex brass-player myself I particularly love his writing for us – it’s challenging but it’s so effective.

When I was listening to the edits a few months ago I was absolutely thrilled with the balance that was achieved. We hear all the colours and rhythmic interest of the wonderful orchestral score without ever losing sight and sound of the text, and the singers and the recording team have done an amazing job. I do hope people enjoy it, because it’s a really special recording.

You mentioned the Birmingham Opera Company production last summer - did you get to see that?

I couldn’t make it to any of the performances as I was away on holiday, but I heard very good reports from lots of people. I think it was a very different encounter with the piece from the one represented on our recording, perhaps particularly in terms of the chorus: we had an amazing small professional ensemble in the BBC Singers, whereas Birmingham Opera used a largely amateur group who were taught the music by ear. The chorus writing in New Year is very challenging, but those of us who received a traditional musical education should never underestimate raw talent: sometimes performers who don’t share that background can tackle music like this just as effectively as we can, if not more so.

If someone unfamiliar with Tippett were dipping a toe into the score via a streaming service, which passages strike you as the most enticing entry-points?

NMC asked me the same question recently, and it’s one I struggle to answer! I love the duet between Jo Ann and Pelegrin, which is towards the end of Act Three: ‘The Presentation of the Rose’, which might take some people back to Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier... And I think the opening of the piece is so strong: that incredible combination of saxophone, piano and guitar sets the scene, then the first pronunciation of The Presenter [the wonderful Alan Oke on our recording] absolutely encapsulates the character and the weirdness of everything that’s to come. The aggressive Act Two confrontation with Donny and the chorus is also very impressive, and Ross [Ramgobin] and the BBC Singers did an incredible job with that scene.

You alluded to Der Rosenkavalier there...do you hear echoes of any other twentieth-century operas in the score?

I’m sure he will have been influenced by all kinds of things, but it’s difficult to pinpoint. Like pretty much every composer, he was very aware of the traditions of opera - the chorus-scenes, the love-duets etc - but in this piece I think it’s actually the non-operatic influences that are most interesting. Of course that includes sci-fi but also TV culture, in which Tippett was hugely invested: as Oliver Soden points out in his wonderful biography of Tippett, each act starts with the same guitar and saxophone introduction and it’s like the theme-music for a soap-opera! 

Nobody else writes music like Tippett. I suppose you could say that of virtually every composer, but you feel it especially strongly with some people: I’m currently in Glasgow doing The Makropulos Affair and was just thinking that nobody else sounds quite like Janáček! Aside from a unique fingerprint in the soundworld itself, one thing I’m always conscious of in Tippett is the mosaic-style structure of his pieces. Virtually every musical idea in New Year makes more than one appearance, and it’s exactly the same in the Fourth Symphony: he juxtaposes all sorts of ideas, then revisits them from different perspectives. That was his method of development, and it’s fascinating to hear it in the operatic context - almost like Wagner and his leitmotifs.

I think Tippett has always suffered in comparison to Britten, unfortunately; I suppose the language is slightly more acerbic and harder to grasp, and it’s more complex to put together. But I wonder if part of that perception is because there’s so little performance-tradition with Tippett: if you go to an opera-house in Europe and do Peter Grimes, Billy Budd or Death in Venice they may well have a history with those pieces, but with Tippett’s operas that isn’t the case (even within the UK). One of the driving factors behind the project was to encourage more organisations and conductors to give it a go, and I’m sure someone will take up the challenge…

You have an album of music by another composer who’s still under-represented on record due out at the end of this month - namely Havergal Brian…

Brian’s a very interesting composer – completely bonkers, but a lot of fun! The album includes a couple of the shorter symphonies (both impressive and quite accessible pieces), then the one-act opera Agamemnon which has some great moments but would be a nightmare to do on stage because the orchestration is insane! As with New Year, it’s a real labour of love to get these things out in front of the public, but it’s absolutely worth it: somebody forwarded me some amazing fan mail the other day which just goes to show this music really does speak very strongly to some people.

The sole recording of Tippett's fourth opera The Ice Break (1977) will be reissued on Warner Classics in the near future; the cast includes David Wilson-Johnson, Heather Harper, Cynthia Clarey, Carolann Page, Thomas Randle, Bonaventura Bottone and Sarah Walker, with David Atherton conducting the London Sinfonietta.