Michael Tippett’s ‘New Year’
Birmingham Opera Company, The Dream Tent, 10/07/2024
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – Alpesh Chauhan, conductor | Birmingham Opera Company Chorus (with actors and dancers) – Mariana Rosas, director | Sarah Pring, Franscesca Chiejina, Sakiwe Mkosana, Shaun Cope, Samantha Crawford, Lucian Lucas, Joshua Stewart, Grace Durham and Oskar McCarthy – soloists.
Birmingham Opera Company’s mesmerising, colourful and engagingly quirky revival of Michael Tippett’s fifth and final operatic offering, ‘New Year’, combines the depth and challenge of a received high art form with the energising power and glitz of musical theatre.
Premiered by Houston Grand Opera in 1989, in a production by Peter Hall (subsequently adapted by Glyndebourne in situ and on tour), ‘New Year’ is Tippett at his brashest, most eccentric and most artistically defiant. Written in his eighties, the three act narrative spans “Somewhere and Today” and “Nowhere and Tomorrow”.
As terror and conflict in the urban world grows ever-greater, child psychologist Jo Ann wishes to work with its young victims. But she herself is frightened, discouraged and divided – not least by the disruptive pain of her foster brother Donny, alienated from relations with their tough-minded Nan, but most especially from his submerged and confused African roots.
In the midst of this trauma, an otherworldly trio arrive. Merlin, Pelegrin and Regan are time travellers from the future, bringing with them the wizardry (and limits) of technology. They represent a different form of disconnection, but also the lure of wisdom, hope, imagination and possibility. Pelegrin and Jo Ann find in one another aspects of what they are each seeking for, but which neither can comprehend alone. The Jungian archetypes are evident, as often with Tippett.
The second act centres on a New Year's festive celebration in which an entranced shaman induces the crowd of revellers to beat Donny. He is the scapegoat whose punishment will evict the old world and usher in the new. Jo Ann rescues Donny, but the coaxing rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ cannot disguise the unresolved turmoil and division.
In the third act, Pelegrin presents Jo Ann with a rose, a symbol of their quest for love. It is lost (they cannot ultimately be together) but then recovered (Jo Ann rediscovers through Pelegrin the courage finally to face her Terror Town, both internally and externally). The final words of the opera are ones Tippett borrowed from Mark Knopfler at the 1985 Live Aid concert: “One humanity, one justice.”
Birmingham Opera Company (BOC) has chosen to project this many-layered imaginary into the only kind of architectural, dramaturgical and immersive space where it can really work. The vast circus-style canopy known (appropriately) as The Dream Tent was erected on the site of the former Smithfield Wholesale Markets in central Birmingham. It is the perfect setting for the clash and consonance of an uncertain present and an unclear future.
The focus of the action is a black, bare, circular stage, stark in its simplicity. This is where dreams will be both created and broken, and around which the audience mostly gathers. It will be further transformed by netting and image projections in Act Three. On either side of the central stage are elevated rectangular spaces for the City of Birmingham Orchestra and the chorus of singers and dancers, respectively. Then at each end of the performance area, separated by the circular stage, are Jo Ann’s apartment and the vestibule of a spaceship for the time travellers.
One of the many successes of this daring production is the way the whole performance area is used to embody the divisions and connections of the drama, with plenty of movement around and between the different spaces. Dance and movement, which the composer conceived of as crucial to the whole concept of ‘New Year’, is what effects key transitions and keeps the narrative in flux.
The music itself effectively visits all eras of Tippett’s output, from the lilting and lyrical to the sparse and spicy. The orchestration is rich, contrasting and textured. It includes a battery of percussion, lead and bass electric guitars, harp and electronics, alongside the familiar strings, woodwind and brass. The score features moments of intense lyricism, mosaic-like blocks of sound, contrapuntal complexity, atonality, and riffs drawing on rap, reggae and blues. There are moments of sheer musical futurism, the driving rhythms of the present, as well as a host of references and hints to both classical and popular traditions – from fleeting Mozart (echoes of Tippett’s acclaimed first opera, ‘The Midsummer Marriage’) to mangled Morricone.
Two of the main dilemmas of ‘New Year’, fusing into one huge challenge for BOC, are the libretto and its cultural references and assumptions – especially when it comes to Donny negotiating his African heritage, Black street patois, and evocations of shamanism. Wisely, this production neither apologises nor explains. There are, undeniably, a number of car-crash lyrics. But also phrases and aphorisms which somehow redeem such flaws with a transcendental vision of humanity healed.
The era of Reagan and Thatcher was the present-day backdrop for the original ‘New Year’, and this – with its contemporary resonances – is present alongside everything from Blake’s 7 to William Blake, from hip hop to T. S. Eliot. Tippett threw absolutely everything into the musical and cultural cauldron for his final opera. His vocal settings are typically angular, reflecting the difficulty of the sentiments he is ripping at the very tendons of language to express. Eliot might have caustically and affectionately dubbed the whole enterprise “a raid on the (in)articulate”.
In performance terms, BOC have worked a piece of joyous artistic alchemy with ‘New Year’. They have surfaced its innumerable strengths and saliences, while simultaneously contextualising its flaws. Sarah Pring, as Nan, exudes a poised authority in her role (she was also in the original Glyndebourne cast), ably accompanied by Franscesca Chiejina (a heartfelt, affecting Jo Ann) and Sakiwe Mkosana (bringing nuance as well as vigour to Donny, whose character can easily disappear into gratuitous stereotype). Shaun Cope complements this well, as Donny’s spirit.
Meanwhile, Samantha Crawford’s Regan is fizzing with authority, humour, strutting sexuality, and more than an ironic hint of a space-age Iron Lady. Lucian Lucas is magically genderfluid as Merlin, and Joshua Stewart touches earth with beautiful muscularity as Pelegrin. The whole is well wrapped up (pun slightly intended) by MC presenters Grace Durham and Oskar McCarthy. Sharing the original singular role, they conjure a retro club vibe, aided by the costumes, and by pre-, mid- and post-performance music that ranges from David Bowie and Cher to Babylon Zoo and House of Pain.
A vital part of BOC’s ‘New Year’ is a chorus heavily populated by people drawn from local communities and local schools. Navigating music of this scale and complexity is a mountain to climb. They and their professional tutors ascend the summit magnificently in the circumstances, also taking on dancing and acting roles which benefit from their improvised and slightly irregular patterns.
Bravo too, as anticipated, to the rightly acclaimed City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of BOC Music Director Alpesh Chauhan, who has absorbed every aspect of this demanding score. Communicating music as varied, layered and complicated as this in a vast arena is the opposite of easy. Theirs is a tight, boldly articulated account, with rhythmic punch and otherworldly flow as required.
Keeping the whole show together is a production, staging and lighting team at the top of their game. There were so many places where this venture could have come apart, but attention and continuity is largely achieved. In truth, however, the tent acoustic is often unkind to the detail. The electronic components could also have benefitted from a refit. But the big-picture impact is undeniable. The audience members I talked to – gloriously diverse, and beyond what is perceived as the ‘usual’ opera range – were clearly bowled over by the whole “show”, as one of them called it.
BOC general director Richard Willacy and his team, following unenviably in the footsteps of the pioneering (and sadly, late) artistic director Graham Vick, have done a fine job of demonstrating that opera can indeed re-pitch itself in the twenty-first century, Serious art and popular expression, cultural diversity and the very highest standards of performance: these do not always have to be implacable enemies or forced and awkward partners.
In summary, there is something outrageously over-ambitious about ‘New Year’, striving for another world in the midst of the evident discomforts of this one. As philosopher Cornel West has said, justice is what love looks like in public, and tenderness is what love looks like in private. Michael Tippett felt and knew this in his bones. His socialism, at an earlier stage in his life violent and angry, was something that later mutated into the search for Jungian-style interpersonal and social transformations. It was very definitely (to echo Billy Bragg’s song, ‘Upfield’) “a socialism of the heart”.
This deep commitment – not without its fallibilities – comes across in this seemingly wacky work which remains relentless in the search for sanity and humanity amid dislocation. There are definitely masterpiece moments struggling to emerge from ‘New Year’. Its sometimes infuriating unevenness is perhaps, paradoxically, an unavoidable part of its final magic and allure. It is also typical Tippett, the fractured genius. An acquired taste, but one that, once acquired, can never be forgotten.
The composer, who died in 1998, must be beaming from eternity at this glorious recovery of an absorbingly eccentric work which had been long forgotten – and which many had confidently proclaimed dead and buried. In this production, and in a more studied live recording from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers early next year, it is back… and kicking.
‘New Year’ is running from 7-13 July 2024.
