King Priam

I bought this on a whim, having heard only the slightest bit of Tippett's orchestral music and none of his operas. I expected the music to be "difficult," and the performances stilted, but I was oh so wrong! Yes, this is definitely late 20th century music -- often dissonant and atonal, but it is utterly beautiful, emotionally moving music. I'm a huge fan of Britten's operas, and judge all modern opera composers by his standards, and (pardon my gushing) Sir Michael is more than up to the challenge. First of all, he takes on the daunting task of adapting the Iliad into a opera libretto and manages to compress the drama beautifully into 3 acts that tell the story imaginatively, comprehensively and in a wholly theatrical manner. Second, he uses the music to heighten the sense of character by giving each persona a unique style of vocal line and orchestration (yes, this is what all composers do, or try to do, but Tippett succeeds in a way few others do). Several of the characters are accompanied by solo instruments (bravura parts of concerto-like difficulty performed brilliantly) -- Achilles by solo guitar, Helen by solo cello, King Priam by violin, etc. Three characters form a sort of Greek chorus who comment on the action and bring a sense of questioning morality to the whole.All of the solo singers are astutely cast and sing with amazing power. Standouts (difficult to single out any of them, they're all so brilliant): Phillip Langridge is first-rate as Paris, Priam's second son -- he sings with enormous power and pathos at the same time. Felicity Palmer is velvety sex personified as Helen. Norman Bailey as Priam has a raw edginess to his sound, which lends such a sense of reality to a man pushed to the edge by fate and his warring sons. The London Philharmonia gives a virtuoso performance, led sensitively and intelligently by David Atherton. The digital sound is crystal clear and beautifully engineered: the sound couldn't be better live at the Met! Take a chance on this one, and enter into an operatic world you will never forget.

The consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962 was responsible for Epstein's Michael & the Devil, Graham Sutherland's giant tapestry of Christ in Glory, John Piper's glorious baptistry window and the world premieres of both Britten's War Requiem and Tippett's King Priam - appropriately both were major anti-war pieces by pacifist composers. It would be hard to imagine such an outpouring of masterpieces (though, personally, I'm not sure about the Sutherland) in this day and age!Such was the immediate success of Britten's piece, though, that Tippett's opera took a while longer to emerge from its shadow - which it eventually did through Sam Wannamaker's dramatic production at Covent Garden. And it had to wait nearly twenty years for this first recording.The opera surprised, even shocked listeners at the time for it represented a marked change of style in Tippett's output. The soaring lyricism of his early period as heard in The Midsummer Marriage and which was largely based on the unique sound that Tippett could elicit from the upper strings, had been replaced by a much grittier, sparser, leaner sound with its foundations in the brass and woodwind. This was the start of what is usually recognised as the composer's middle-period and which led to works like the Concerto for Orchestra, The Vision of St. Augustine and The Knot Garden. In Priam it is a sound that grows out of the fanfares and alarums of war at the very beginning of the opera, but which also leads us to the striding piano chords that usually accompany Priam himself, the huntsmen's horns is Scene 2, Patroclus' solo horn and even to the flickering solo guitar of Achilles' campfire.While War - specifically the Trojan War - provides the background for most of the action after Act 1, the opera is about much more personal themes as well. Principally it is about choice and the consequences of even the smallest choices we make, what Tippett himself called, "the mysterious nature of human choice". From the choice to kill a son prophesied to be responsible for his father's death, through the choice to re-admit him to the family, through that son's fatal choice in the Judgement of Paris, through Achilles choice to let Patroclus wear his armour and his later choice to allow a grieving father to take home the mutilated body of his eldest son, it is these choices that haunt the piece and which lead to the classically Aristotelian tragic catastrophe at the end.As the opera's title suggests, it is King Priam himself and not the more familiar heroic characters of the Iliad who lies at the centre of the piece and, in this recording, he receives a towering, Wotanic performance from Norman Bailey. Bailey was always a master at penetrating to the human core of any character he played - whether the obstinate resoluteness of a Kutuzov, the bluff sympathy of a Balstrode, the unsentimental goodness of a Barak or the humanity underlying the godlike façade of a Wotan. So here he adumbrates all the facets of the title-role from kingly arrogance to a father's pitiful, grieving pleading. And the strong vocal lines sit firmly and powerfully in the heart of his distinctive and individual vocal colour.The rest of the cast is a roll-call of the best English singers of the period (late 70's). Thomas Allen makes a strong forthright Hector, Philip Langridge a shifty but finally resolute Paris. Robert Tear is predictably sensitive to the words and shifting colours of Achilles' song of his homeland and to the growth of mutual grief when Priam begs for the return of his son's body, but lacks the last few ounces of heft for one of the most hair-raising moments in Twentieth Century opera - when the terrifying sound of Achilles' war-cry echoes across the plains from the Greek camp to the walls of Troy.The three main women - Heather Harper, Felicity Palmer and Yvonne Minton - all sing and act wonderfully, making their big trio in Act 3 (which can outstay its welcome) into a highlight of this performance. The London Sinfonietta under David Atherton bring great clarity and acuity to the testing contrapuntal lines of this masterly score, well aided and abetted by the Decca engineers in the warm acoustics of the Kingsway Hall and by the Chandos re-mastering onto CD. This is still the only recording of an important opera in the Tippett canon, but it is hard to think of it being easily bettered.

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