Principal Conductor Edward Gardner, soprano Nadine Benjamin and London Philharmonic Orchestra
(Picture: LPO)As part of its 90th anniversary celebrations, the LPO mounted a double bill of works from its catalogue of premieres – Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music and Michael Tippett’s A Child of our Time – not usually heard together. Markedly different as the two works are, it turned out to be an inspired choice.
Where the Vaughan Williams, a setting of the celebrated passage from Act V of The Merchant of Venice beginning ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!’, is a consonant hymn to musical harmony, for the Tippett the ‘world turns on its dark side’, as the composer/librettist puts it, to meditate on the horrific massacre of Kristallnacht and humanity’s innate potential for savagery.
