NMC Guest Playlist 9: Oliver Soden

An eclectic essay in musical diversity

Any playlist put together to celebrate Michael Tippett’s last opera, New Year, is going to be eclectic, an essay in musical diversity. Tippett was interested in melding the seemingly incompatible. His scores were a means of exploring all the exciting and conflicting directions in which the music of his century seemed to be moving, without ever nailing his colours to a single mast. One of his earliest pieces, the Piano Sonata No 1 [1]  (available on a valuable NMC disc of historic recordings, Remembering Tippett) set out his stall, commingling blues, gamelan, and folksong; his oratorio A Child of Our Time then placed African-American spirituals through a score that shows his love of Tudor madrigals, Beethoven and Bartók. The most important word in describing his style is often “and”: Beethoven and blues; a twelve-tone row and C major. So wide is his musical embrace that, come New Year (which he wrote in his ninth decade), the patchwork includes reggae and ska; the counterpoint of Renaissance polyphony; an electronic tape; sections of atonality, and rapturous passages of F major.

It’s a deliberately disconcerting jumble, unconcerned with synthesis, embracing the jarring incongruity of its jostle of genres and styles. So is this playlist. I have started with two composers, both American, whose company is a better fit for Tippett than the British figures to whom he is usually compared: Leonard Bernstein’s divisive, heart-on-sleeve, embarrassing-exhilarating Mass [2] and William Bolcom’s astonishing Songs of Innocence and Experience [3] both employ a panoply of styles, from folk, rock, reggae and electronics to twelve-note rows and intense dissonance. Bernstein’s “Celebrant” figure, in Mass, is an intriguing parallel to Tippett’s “Presenter”. The Presenter is a reminder that Tippett’s conception of theatre was formed by his association with the Group Theatre in the 1930s; he was invited to compose the music for W. H. Auden’s play The Dance of Death, which is set on New Year’s Eve and framed by an “Announcer”. He declined, and it is Britten whose collaborations with the Group became famous, as with the score for Auden’s The Ascent of F6 [4], recorded in its entirety by NMC.

Britten once pondered writing a children’s opera about space travel called Tyco the Vegan, but abandoned the idea, leaving New Year as one of the few British operas to engage with science-fiction and fantasy. Tippett’s incorporation of flying saucers, spaceships and time travel led to critical raised eyebrows – one of its inspirations was the television drama The Flipside of Dominick Hide, with a theme tune by the band Meal Ticket [5]. But travel from one world to another is the story of one of the earliest operas, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo [6] (and Tippett was a pioneering devotee of Monteverdi). Haydn’s Il Mondo della Luna [7] contains brilliant string writing dramatising a flight to the moon (although the traveller in this case has been duped), and Janáček sent an opera protagonist to the moon in The Excursions of Mr Brouček [8]. In 1959, the Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl caused a stir with his opera Aniara [9], which employs a medley of electronics, jazz, and serially organised music to depict its spaceship, leaving a poisoned Earth for Mars. More recently Kaija Saariaho wrote Reconnaissance [10], a “science-fiction madrigal”, and no consideration of other-worldly opera would be complete without Stockhausen’s interplanetary visions: here is his breathtaking and moving “Helikopter-Streichquartett” [11] (from Mittwoch aus Licht) in which sound itself is sent on a journey through space, and music made across seemingly insuperable barriers and distances.

From The Communards to CRY

New Year also bespeaks the octogenarian Tippett’s interest in pop music. He approached The Communards [12] about a possible collaboration (they declined), and took the final line of the libretto from Mark Knopfler prior to a performance of “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits [13]. Richard Eyre’s National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls [14] made him convinced that New Year should be staged as a music-theatre piece at the National, and only the lack of an orchestra pit persuaded him otherwise.

A clutch of British composers now, starting with music by his friend Steve Martland [15] (on an NMC survey), who sent samples of reggae and ska during preparation for New Year, and whose filtering of Purcell or Bach through the patterns and rhythms of minimalism and rock owes something to Tippett, whom he esteemed. Another younger composer Tippett venerated was Giles Swayne, whose masterpiece, CRY [16], also released by NMC, was an influence on The Mask of Time, Tippett’s late choral work, quoted in New Year.

One of Tippett’s closest contemporaries was the great composer Priaulx Rainier [17] , whose settings of John Donne produced one of Peter Pears’s most hauntingly beautiful recordings. I have included too Elisabeth Lutyens’s hair-raising dramatic monologue Isis and Osiris [18] (part of a pioneering NMC survey of her still-neglected chamber music) – not that she would have approved, stating with her characteristic good humour that all Tippett had to do was “fart and the critics would applaud”.

Next, a second descent to the underworld with NMC’s historic release of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus [19]. Tippett, attending the premiere, was so knocked out by the music he temporarily stopped composing to clear his mind before returning to work on New Year, which, thirty-five years after its premiere, now joins The Mask of Orpheus as one of the operatic jewels in NMC’s catalogue.

To finish, two tracks from New Year itself, the opening prelude “Our World is Wicked” [20] and “Thrice Magic Machine” [21] from Act II Scene 2, both selected by NMC Recordings to highlight the release.

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Oliver Soden is a writer and broadcaster, and the critically acclaimed author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (2019); Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat (2020); and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (2023). Oliver's writing – on art, music and literature – has appeared in the Guardian, Spectator, London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement, and his short fiction has been published by Prospect. He is a frequent guest speaker at literary and music festivals and on BBC Radios 3 and 4, Times Radio and ABC Radio National; he has lectured at the National Galleries of Scotland, the English Speaking Union in New York, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Geneva. Film and television appearances include ITV News; the BBC's Villages by the Sea; and feature documentaries on Tippett and on the Ritz Hotel. He has worked on award-winning television documentaries such as Janet Baker: In Her Own Words and for BBC Radio 3's long-running programme Private Passions.

Oliver was educated at Lancing College in Sussex, and at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. Born in 1990, he grew up in Bath and Sussex, and lives in London. 

New Year was released on NMC Recordings on Friday 14 March 2025 and is available to buy here.