There can be few pieces of music more relevant to our current political situation than Michael Tippett’s A Child of our Time. At a time when across the globe, millions of people are forcibly displaced having fled war, violence and persecution, Tippett’s true story of a 17 year old Polish Jew living in occupied Paris has universal significance. The oratorio, which the composer began just two days before the outbreak of the Second World War, dramatises the boy’s frustration when he attempts to gain official papers from the German authorities: angered by the persecution of his mother, he shoots a German diplomat, resulting in his arrest and subsequent disappearance, and a violent pogrom of revenge in Germany.
In the manner of Bach’s Passions, Tippett uses one of the soloists as a narrator and he interweaves the dramatic action with reflective solo arias and choruses, here based not on chorales but spirituals – songs of an oppressed race. The radiant final ensemble, however, ends on a note of optimism, explaining that ‘here is no final grieving, but an abiding hope’.
As well as the works of Bach, Beethoven was a huge influence on Tippett, so we open our concert with a rarely performed early work by Beethoven, his Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II. Although it was written when the composer was just 19, it is a work of extraordinary maturity in many aspects, with plaintive choral and woodwind writing, dramatic virtuosity in the monumental bass aria, and graceful melodic lines permeating its two soprano arias.
The Newcastle Bach Choir is looking forward to returning to Newcastle Cathedral with its wonderfully transformed space following major refurbishment. The choir will be joined once again by the Newcastle University Symphony Orchestra – its first concert since the start of the pandemic – and by an impressive quartet of soloists, two of whom have local connections. Tenor Richard Pinkstone sang as a boy with the cathedral choir, while soprano Ana Fernández Guerra is a music graduate of Newcastle University.