Reaching the Tippett point

In Oliver Soden’s new biography of Michael Tippett, he describes how Tippett wanted to open his Fourth Symphony with the sound of breathing: ‘as if the orchestra itself had lungs.’ Tippett had no idea how to achieve this effect, and at the première in 1977 they used an orchestral wind machine — a canvas band rubbing against a wooden drum. It proved about as convincing as it sounds, so at later performances a musician exhaled down a microphone. The effect, writes Soden, was reminiscent of an obscene phone call.

And there the matter and (effectively) the symphony rested, until Sound Intermedia — a team of electronic music wizards best known for their work with the London Sinfonietta — attempted something new for a recording with Martyn Brabbins earlier this year. The result could be heard in this performance by the BBC Philharmonic, also conducted by Brabbins, and it seemed to do the trick — a slightly eerie, elemental sound, rising imperceptibly from within the music; not quite human but unquestionably organic.

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So the symphony quickened into life as Tippett intended. Brabbins, an undervalued conductor whose recordings show a profound sympathy for Tippett’s teeming, utterly idiosyncratic brand of symphonic argument, conducted with purpose and a sonic grandeur that proved once again that, two decades after his death in 1998, we’re only really starting to catch up with what Tippett has to tell us. The technical problems are falling away, although in a performance of such epic conviction (and coming after Sir James MacMillan’s comparably taxing Fourth Symphony), it’s no wonder that the BBC Philharmonic’s horns buckled slightly under the strain.

But the years of sniggering about Tippett’s garish clothes and quirky librettos are past; and the slightly dated gesture (for 1977) of writing a full-scale orchestral symphony no longer looks quite so eccentric.