London.(Child of Our Time)(Concert Review)

English National Opera's contribution to the centenary of Michael Tippett looked, on paper, somewhat tangential--just two performances of the first-ever staging of his oratorio A Child of Our Time (January 21). Tippett, after all, composed five operas, of which ENO has a perfectly good production of King Priam in stock. ENO also has a limited tradition of staging oratorios, though neither Deborah Warner's production of Bach's St. John Passion nor Phyllida Lloyd's of the Verdi Requiem did much more than suggest that such pieces clearly do not belong in the theater. Yet Jonathan Kent's version of the Tippett confounded expectations and showed that, given a sufficiently rich visual and dramatic imagination, such projects can be more than empty gestures.

Tippett's work was composed to his own text (arguably his finest) between 1939 and 1941 in response to contemporary events. On November 7, 1938, the young German Jew Herschel Grynspan assassinated the ambassador's third secretary at the German embassy in Paris following Nazi persecution of his race and family. The Nazi response was swift and terrible: the notorious Kristallnacht of November 9 and 10 saw the murder of some ninety-one individuals and the injury of many more, as well as the destruction throughout Germany of thousands of Jewish businesses and more than 100 synagogues. An appalling event in itself, it was the precursor of many far worse crimes to come.

Tippett, who maintained a lifelong concern with humanitarian issues, removed the specifics of these events, though the chorus is at times split into persecutors and persecuted, and Grynspan is clearly the original of the nameless protagonist/victim. The composer's aim was to speak not just of individual but rather universal experience. Borrowing a structure partly from Handel's Messiah and partly from Bach's Passions, Tippett made his own distinctive arrangements of spirituals to replace Bach's chorales as pillars and marking points in his own ...