Nearly 30 years after Michael Tippett’s death aged 93, the composer’s music still divides opinion. Sitting on one side of me during the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of Tippett’s Second Symphony was a man who headbanged appreciatively through the loudest parts. On the other sat a man muttering furiously, who left loudly declaring the performance “a complete waste of time”.
It’s certainly not a symphony on the venerable Beethovenian model. Blocks of material overlap jarringly; the orchestral texture sometimes seems to harbour a rogue agent, as if a musical line has been imported accidentally from another piece; movements end with weird ambivalence. Under the LPO’s principal conductor Edward Gardner, Tippett’s most extravagantly bitonal passages were brash (think multicoloured crazy-paving in sound), the elegiac portions warm and silken. From the incisive chugging of the opening to the finicky busyness elsewhere, Gardner kept this potentially unwieldy score under exquisitely taut control.
