A major operatic rediscovery: Birmingham Opera Company's New Year reviewed

This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time. One of the most thrilling aspects of the Tippett revival has been the discovery that his late masterpieces seem to have been fitted with a four-decade time-fuse. Works that prompted bafflement in the 1970s and 1980s, and then sat there for years looking like duds, are suddenly acquiring their targets. A quarter of a century after Tippett’s death, they’re blinking into life, locking on, and detonating in huge, psychedelic sunbursts of precision-targeted beauty and truth.

Once you treat Tippett’s characters as people rather than symbols, the rest falls into place

In the case of Tippett’s last opera New Year, Merlin (Lucia Lucas) is just one of a trio of otherworldly visitors – travellers in time, and possibly space – who beam down into a contemporary urban dystopia. Or do they? Perhaps they exist only in the imagination of a child psychologist called Jo Ann (Francesca Chiejina), as she despairs of the fractured society around her and struggles to help her delinquent brother Donny.