Tippett: Concerto for Double String Orchestra

Michael Tippett (1905-1998)

Concerto for Double String Orchestra

1. 1 Allegro con brio
2. 2 Adagio cantabile
3. 3 Allegro con brio

Tippett’s apprenticeship as a composer was a long one. Having decided at school that he wanted to be a composer, he entered the Royal College of Music in 1923. However, his distinctive voice only emerged as the result of prolonged effort. It was not until the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, composed in 1938, that he found his distinctive voice as a composer.


The use of folk material is not intended to create any cosy sense of nostalgia; rather it is a reflection of Tippett’s deep humanitarianism, and faith in the ability of a vital tradition to renew itself. Tippett was deeply suspicious of the school of composers that had gathered around Vaughan Williams and had set himself against it. His wider perspective is reflected in the rhythm and harmony, which draw much from the jazz and blues that captivated the young Tippett as so many of his generation. Aaron Copland, on hearing the Concerto for the first time on the radio, assumed that it must be the work of an American.


The term “concerto” is used here in its earlier, Baroque sense of a group playing together rather than the “virtuoso soloist and orchestra” model that it generally refers to today. The two orchestras into which Tippett divides the strings act in tandem rather than opposition. This can be heard clearly in the opening movement, where the melody is passed between the two groups, who answer and imitate each other in a manner reminiscent of Renaissance and early Baroque composers such as Gabrielli and Monteverdi.


The slow movement is a richly lyrical affair, whose languid melodies owe as much to the blues singing of artists such as Bessie Smith as to the string quartet by Beethoven on which it is modelled. The finale builds on the rhythmic playfulness of the opening, and uses a Northumbrian pipe tune to bring the work to a luxuriant close built of intertwining melodic lines.


Tippett conducted the first performance of the Concerto at Morley College in 1940, the same year that he joined the Peace Pledge Union. When the Concerto was performed at the Wigmore Hall in 1943, the Conscientious Objectors’ Bulletin reported, “circumstances beyond his control prevented the composer attending.” The circumstances were that Tippett had refused to undertake full-time fire service or land work as a condition of his status as a conscientious objector. His argument, backed up by no less a figure than Vaughan Williams as witness, was that his most constructive contribution to society was through music. The argument fell on deaf ears, and he was imprisoned for three months.
Vaughan Williams’ willingness to stand up for Tippett was an exceptionally generous act, which began a softening of Tippett’s opinion of him. In later years he admitted that he only came to realise after the elder composer’s death that it was “Vaughan-Williams, rather than any other of his contemporaries, who had made us free.”

Berlioz: Béatrice et Bénédict Overture

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Overture: Béatrice et Bénédict


Berlioz spent most of the 1850s composing and attempting unsuccessfully to secure a production of his epic opera Les Troyens. The strain took its toll, and by 1858 he was showing the first signs of the intestinal illness that would eventually kill him. At the same time, following his divorce from the actress and inspiration for the Symphonie fantastique, Harriet Smithson, he remarried. His second wife, Marie Recio, died suddenly in June 1862, a few months after he completed what would prove to be his last opera, Béatrice et Bénédict.
 
Béatrice, in contrast to Les Troyens, quickly secured a performance and was unveiled in August 1862 in Baden-Baden. Ever the perfectionist, Berlioz found much to vex him in the production, from his difficulties in persuading the musicians to play quietly enough to the inadequate size of the orchestra pit, but despite all this the production was a success. Berlioz conducted it himself, despite his advancing illness, and later remarked that his conducting, which in his earlier years had been criticised for its indiscipline, was greatly improved by his health; the pain forced him to be “less excitable.”

If Les Troyens is Berlioz’s self-consciously grand, tragic magnum opus, then Béatrice et Bénédict is in character its polar opposite, an effervescent, exuberant comedy whose wit and lightness of touch belies the pain he was in as he wrote. The libretto, written by Berlioz himself, is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. (Some commentators have suggested, somewhat unkindly, that Berlioz’s adaptation amounts to “Much Ado About Nothing without the Ado.”) Berlioz’s fascination with Shakespeare was a recurring obsession throughout his career, and it is entirely fitting that a Shakespeare based work should prove to be his swansong.

Opera overtures at this time tended to be pot-pourris of themes from the ensuing drama. Berlioz here weaves together themes from six arias and ensemble pieces from the opera, but with rather more care than most of his contemporaries. The result is a satisfying and coherent piece that has found a regular home in the concert hall.