The completion in 1952 of The Midsummer Marriage, his first opera, had marked a watershed in Michael Tippett’s development. The works that followed in the 1950s moved gradually away from the opera’s super-abundant lyricism towards a much leaner, more abrasive language, and two of Tippett’s finest orchestral works, the Piano Concerto, composed between 1953 and 1955, and the Second Symphony, which followed two years later, marked crucial stages in that stylistic shift.
Neither is among the best known of Tippett’s works. There’s a handful of recorded versions of each, including an earlier version of the concerto with Steven Osborne as soloist, and one of the performances of the symphony conducted by Tippett himself. But brought together in these first-rate accounts from concerts that Edward Gardner conducted in London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2023 (the concerto) and 2024, the two works bring the shifts in Tippett’s musical language into sharp focus. Even in the piano concerto the lyrical episodes have a hard crystalline edge, and even that has almost entirely disappeared in the symphony.
