Unlike his contemporary, Benjamin Britten,
Tippett did not write a great deal for
voice and piano. Perhaps because Tippett
did not have Britten’s parallel career
as a pianist and accompanist he did
not have quite the impetus to write
songs for his own consumption. But Tippett’s
own parallel career - as musical director
at Morley College - had a bearing on
his output; it was whilst at Morley
that he discovered the music of Purcell.
Not only did this influence his style,
but he went on to produce editions of
some of Purcell’s songs.
The present recital
of Tippett’s complete song oeuvre, performed
by tenor John Mark Ainsley and accompanist
Ian Burnside, solves the problem of
what else to put on the disc by including
a generous selection of Tippett’s editions
of Purcell songs.
Tippett’s cantata Boyhood’s
End was written for Benjamin Britten
and Peter Pears in 1943. Using a mixture
of recitative and arioso inspired by
Purcell’s Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation
Tippett produced a wonderfully flexible,
quickly changing work. Surprisingly
he took for his text, not a sequence
of poems, but an extract from W.H. Hudson’s
autobiography Far and Away. Remarkably
in war-torn Britain Tippett was able
to conjure up the magic of Hudson’s
childhood in exotic Argentina.
Tippett went on to
write his song-cycle The Heart’s
Assurance for Britten and Pears
The catalyst, though, was the suicide
of Tippett’s friend Francesca Allinson
in 1945. Tippett was devastated and
it took him five years to produce the
cycle; it is that rare thing, a 2nd
World War song-cycle, using texts by
a pair of poets who died unconscionably
young in the war: one at 19; the other
at 20.
Tippett has a very
personal take on the song genre and
makes very free with the text, in a
wonderfully creative way. The textures
of the piano accompaniment are similarly
original. Britten hated it, resenting
the level of practice that it demanded
and he never played it again.
There are no such problems
in this disc where Ainsley and Burnside
sound as if they were born to perform
this music. Ainsley’s beautiful focused
voice is ideal for Tippett’s complex
vocal lines and Burnside seems a natural
with Tippett’s enriched textures.
Perhaps if Britten
had been more sympathetic, if he and
Pears had performed the cycle with some
degree of regularity, then Tippett might
have been persuaded to write more songs.
As it is the Tippett oeuvre is completed
with a pair of occasional works. Music
can be sung solo or chorally, a florid
setting of Shelley written for the East
Sussex and West Kent Choral Festival
in 1960. The Songs for Ariel
were part of his incidental music to
‘The Tempest’ written for the Old Vic
in 1961. Textures are sparer than in
his earlier piece, but still the baroque
shines through.
Benjamin Britten wrote
his Canticle 1 as a companion
piece to Boyhood’s End. It also
uses Purcell as its inspiration, but
Britten sets a 17th century
text by Francis Quarles. Supposedly
spiritual, it too has a homo-erotic
element and is positively gay - in the
traditional sense of the word - in the
final section.
Ainsley and Burnside
complement these gems with a selection
of Purcell songs produced in editions
by Tippett and Walter Bergman. Tippett
keeps a light, surprisingly modern hand
on the works and his accompaniments
feel far more time-less than Britten’s
more heavily worked versions of this
repertoire. An added novelty is the
inclusion of Tippett and Bergman’s edition
of Pelham Humfrey’s charming setting
of John Donne’s A Hymn to God the
Father.
This disc was recorded
in association with the BBC’s Voices
programme, an excellent initiative
which I hope will enable other young
singers to explore interesting repertoire
on disc.
This is a lovely CD
and shows Ainsley’s vocal talents off
well. The only problem is the weight
of history that these works bring, the
weight of the famous tenors who were
associated with the works. This is not
the only disc to marry Tippett to Purcell;
Martyn Hill and Andrew Ball produced
something similar for Hyperion in 1995.
This has a slight edge in that it includes
the Songs for Achilles, with
guitar accompaniment. But what they
don’t include is Britten’s Canticle
1; I felt that this programme’s
biggest strength was the way we could
experience the problematic interaction
between two great contemporaries.
Robert Hugill
John Mark Ainsley (tenor) 
