Search - Michael Tippett, Richard Hickox, BBC National Orchestra of Wales :: Tippett: The Rose Lake; Ritual dances [Hybrid SACD]

The Legacy of Sir Michael Tippett

Grady Harp | Los Angeles, CA United States | 04/01/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"British composers are often overlooked in the total picture of classical composition, as though the island could never compare with the continent of Europe. That fault does not take into account some of the genius music that hails from England: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Edward Elgar, and yes, even Michael Tippett. This recording should add to the respect for Tippett's work that deserves far more performance than it has achieved.



Tippett is best known for his operas, and of those the most frequently performed is 'The Midsummer Marriage', a wildly eclectic story that vies with 'The Magic Flute' for mixing reality with fantasy. One work of Tippett's that deserves far more attention is the set of 'Ritual Dances' excerpted form that opera and as performed here by Richard Hickox and the BBC National Orchestra Wales. This is richly and thickly orchestrated melodic music with a heavy bow to Strauss and Wagner, but it is music that not only dances but sings. There is some very original orchestration here that Hickox manages to bring to the surface of even the heaviest moments.



But for sheer beauty Tippett's 'The Rose Lake' is transcendent music, finding the bonding with nature through the depiction of a lake in Senegal that changes colors from green to rose in the course of a day. Few composers, in a single work, find a communication with nature the way this extraordinarily lovely work does. It is perfectly performed here by Hickox who seems to understand every nuance of this complex score. It is memorable. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp. April 06



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EARLY AND LATE TIPPETT IN EXCELLENT PERFORMANCES

Klingsor Tristan | Suffolk | 11/22/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Rose Lake is a very late Tippett work, his last orchestral score, in fact. In style, it lives alongside pieces such as The Mask of Time and, especially, the Triple Concerto. The Midsummer Marriage, on the other hand, is relatively early - the pinnacle of Tippett's lyrical, rhythmically electric first period, epitomised by the Corelli Fantasia.



The pairing of the The Rose Lake with the Ritual Dances from the early opera is thus a fascinating coupling. It's amazing how far Tippett travelled in his composing career. He was not a 'natural' composer in the way that Britten was. He achieved his unique voice through application, study, trial and error and sheer hard work as much as by inspiration. The style he evolved in his later works was to set contrasting blocks of material boldly and starkly against each other and generate dramatic tension through the friction between them. This is the fundamental structure of pieces like The Vision of St. Augustine and the Fourth Symphony. It is similar to the structure of many of Messiaen's works, too. It is also the basis for The Rose Lake. But here there is an added dimension as well. The piece was inspired by a visit Tippett made to a small lake in Senegal which changes through the course of a day from a greenish colour to a deep rose pink and back again. So the piece is a dawn-to-dusk evocation of this marvel of nature (cf. many of Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux). Several important landmarks in the work are described by the composer as the moments when the Lake 'sings' - perhaps an extension of the end of The Mask of Time when 'the singing will never end'. These 'songs' are certainly wonderfully lyrical moments, like those that have permeated Tippett's work from Child of Our Time days through to the glorious slow movement of the Triple Concerto. The orchestral palette is also magically evocative, glittering and shimmering with much use of tuned percussion and with a large unifying role for the roto-toms, often unusually supporting key melodic lines.



The Hickox performance (and the Chandos recording) certainly brings out all the colour and glamour of Tippett's orchestration without ever losing sight of the overall structure. Colin Davis and the LSO perhaps make more of Tippett the Visionary or the Seer in the piece. But Hickox, whose Welsh players seem to have the music more firmly under their fingers, make Tippett's contrapuntal complexities clearer while letting the lyricism and the tone-poem aspects speak for themselves.



The Ritual Dances on this disc abound with effervescent energy and the textures glow with an ample richness. These, too, in Hickox's hands are nature pieces, conjuring up the Earth in Autumn, the Waters in Winter, the Air in Spring and the Fire in Summer, each of the first three depicting the pursuit of a male animal by a female. I'm not sure anyone can touch John Pritchard, conductor of the opera's world premiere, in these pieces, but Hickox and the BBC Welsh Orchestra run him pretty close.

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