A Child of Our Time | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

A Child of Our Time asks big questions in need of answers, and after nearly 80 years we appear to be no closer to finding them.

Brett Weymark conducts the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and choir in A Child of Our Time at the Adelaide Festival 2021. Picture: Tim Standing

A Child of Our Time

Classical Music / AUS

FESTIVAL

Festival Theatre

March 14

Major works by two big names of British music dominated this Festival – Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time.

Tippett, it’s fair to say, was a very unusual character – variously a communist, a Trotskyite, a passionate believer in Jungian psychology, a conscientious objector in World War II, and a late starter as a composer.

A Child of Our Time, written while the war raged, was his first success and remains among his most highly regarded works, although Tippett’s reputation has followed an erratic trajectory over the past few decades.

To admire the originality and beauty of his music, one must be prepared to accept the embarrassing, wince-inducing moments that are sometimes part of it.

English composer Sir Michael Tippett (1905-1998).

One thing one can say for A Child of Our Time is that it takes the trouble to ask some big questions that are in need of answers, and nearly 80 years after its premiere we appear to be no closer to finding them.

The moral question with which Tippett began was: Should the young Jew Herschel Grynszpan have shot the Nazi Ernst vom Rath? A moral dilemma, to which Tippett’s answer seems to have been no, though most people in 1942 would probably have said yes.

This is a work about morality and human psychology, which Tippett saw in Jungian terms, with us all having a hidden dark side (or shadow). Morality then is not just a simplistic matter of good versus evil.

Soprano Jessica Dean and the choir perform A Child of Our Time at the Adelaide Festival 2021. Picture: Tim Standing

It was a fine performance of this unusual and morally challenging work. Under the direction of conductor Brett Weymark, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra handled Tippett’s idiosyncratic orchestration splendidly.

The choir, comprising several different choral groups brought together for the performance, were scattered across the stage in casual clothes, as though they had just walked in off the street.

The most memorable parts of the work are the Spirituals, which sounded splendid, especially with the soprano of Jessica Dean soaring sublimely above the choir. The other soloists, Elizabeth Campbell, Henry Choo, and Pelham Andrews were uniformly excellent.

Video projections behind the performance featured the inevitable Nazis, and more contemporary footage about moral challenges we face today.

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