This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have two works appropriate for the New Year, and both of them will be by English composers.
Sir Michael Tippett’s “New Year” was the composer’s fifth and final opera. Set in Terror Town, an imaginary city, the location of which is described as “Somewhere Today,” the time is New Year’s Eve. The character personae features such unusual and diverse elements as a child psychiatrist, her Rastafarian foster brother, a shaman, and three time travelers from the future – or, as Tippett specifies, “Nowhere Tomorrow.”
The suite opens and closes with the arrival and departure of a spaceship, which is represented electronically in the score. Other striking touches included the use of saxophones, and, at the work’s climax, a quotation of “Auld Lang Syne,” against a rather turbulent backdrop.
The opera was first performed at the Houston Grand Opera in 1989, with the British premiere at Glyndebourne the following year. It 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.
The remainder of the hour 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 greatest masterpieces. He goes on to support his thesis with no less than 152 examples in his dizzyingly clever “Fantasia on ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”
In the few minutes left at the end of the show, I include a Tomlinson encore. It’s not a New Year’s piece, strictly speaking, though the subject of the work has to be home by the stroke of twelve.
I hope you’ll join me for “T Time,” – music for the New Year by English composers whose surnames happen to begin with T – this Sunday night at 10 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
