This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have contrasting works for the New Year by two English composers whose surnames begin with “T.”

Sir Michael Tippett’s fifth and final opera is an especially abstruse one, even by Tippett standards. Composed on his own libretto, “New Year” is set in Terror Town, an imaginary city that exists “somewhere today.” The dramatis personae includes such diverse characters as a child psychiatrist, her Rastafarian foster brother, a shaman, and three time-travelers from the future – or, as Tippett specifies, “nowhere tomorrow.”

The orchestral suite opens and closes with music for the arrival and departure of a spaceship, represented electronically, on New Year’s Eve. Other striking touches include the use of saxophones, and, at the work’s climax, a quotation of “Auld Lang Syne,” pitted against a rather turbulent backdrop.

“New Year” was first performed at Houston Grand Opera in 1989, with the British premiere taking place at Glyndebourne the following year. The opera was not well received. The wholly reimagined suite was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in 1990. Tippett noted that the primary metaphor of the opera is dance. Hey, man, whatever.

The balance of the program will be devoted to works by a composer of a very different sensibility – master of British Light Music, Ernest Tomlinson. It is Tomlinson’s tongue-in-cheek assertion that the melody of “Auld Lang Syne” underlies most of the world’s great masterpieces. He goes on to support his thesis with no less than 152 examples in his dizzyingly clever “Fantasia on ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

We’ll conclude with a waltz from Tomlinson’s “Cinderella,” someone else who clearly understands the transformative power of 12.

The kettle is on. Turn over a new leaf and join me for a cuppa, with “’T’ Time” – welcoming the New Year with music by Tippett and Tomlinson – this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.