This is the time of year when we can cast a glance back over the past months and catch up on any outstanding recordings we may have overlooked, or simply not had the opportunity to review until now. And this year we’ve chosen an exceptionally fine recording from a conductor who is steadily consolidating his reputation as the finest living exponent of the music of Michael Tippett. Edward Gardner has inherited this mantle from the two Davises, Colin and Andrew. At the helm of the London Philharmonic, he has already given us acclaimed live performances of the 1977 opera The Ice Break, and the Second Symphony plus the Piano Concerto with soloist Steven Osborne.

In September this year, the LPO’s own label further released what is surely Tippett’s best-known work, the harrowingly powerful ‘modern oratorio’ A Child of Our Time, composed between 1939 and 1941 in response to the horrors of Kristallnacht (as well as the desperate Paris assassination of a German diplomat which provided its pretext), and premiered by this same orchestra on 19 March 1944. Taken from a live performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 26 November 2022, Gardner’s sweeping and intensely moving account has the London Philharmonic Choir joined by the London Adventist Chorale to add extra authenticity to the spirituals which punctuate the narrative in a manner similar to the chorales in Bach’s Passion settings. A formidable team of soloists is comprised of mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and baritone Roderick Williams as the narrators, with soprano Nadine Benjamin and tenor Kenneth Tarver as the The Mother and The Boy, whose story forms the basis for Part Two of the work.

The three-part structure is modelled on Handel’s Messiah, but the pattern of prophecy–narrative–interpretation here has a very different feel, dealing as much with Jungian archetypes of light and shadow as with contemporary events. The self-knowledge of those who are able to recognise in themselves both ‘light’ and ‘shadow’ is contrasted with the un-self-aware who project their ‘shadows’ onto others. Articulated very directly by Tippett’s own text (T.S. Eliot refused a request to write the libretto, as he wisely observed that the result would be ‘too poetic’), the result is arguably as relevant today, with events in Gaza, Israel and Ukraine as well as the global upsurge of nationalist politics, as it was in the dark days of World War II.

Gardner’s performance goes right to the core of this work, led by Williams’s heartfelt singing as the Narrator, and matched in intensity by the other three soloists (the ringing sonorities of ‘Steal Away’ at the end of Part One are particularly affecting). The Mother and Son at the centre of the narrative convey both the immediacy of the particular and the universality of their desperate situation, and the sense of involvement is equalled by the choirs, who slip deftly from being an antagonistic mob to the universal ‘other’ as well as the distressed onlookers. From the bleak opening (‘The world turns on its dark side’) to the curiously uplifting (hope against hope?) of the final ‘General Ensemble’ and closing spiritual (‘Deep River’), this is a performance of searing commitment, with the pillars of the five spirituals especially involving in their communality.

Nor is the importance of the orchestral colours overlooked. The fragile desolation of the Interludium in Part One is notably moving, before it bursts out at the questions ‘Is evil then good? Is reason untrue?’ These are questions that many of us will have asked ourselves since the emergence of today’s post-truth, fake-news society, and the visceral sense of a live performance is palpable, albeit with an impeccably behaved audience. Forget the sniping criticisms of the spirituals and homespun libretto that marred A Child’s early reception, forget also (regrettably) the rather studio-bound account of the work from Andrew Davis and BBC forces released on Chandos in 2024. This new LPO performance goes to the top of the recommendations for this singularly potent work, emotionally powerful and sadly as relevant and as necessary now as it was in the 1940s. Tippett himself felt both moved and responsible to articulate these difficult but universal issues; our duty is to re-hear them afresh with every generation.