Tippett: Piano Concerto; Symphony No 2 album review – the energy of the music is irrepressible

The completion in 1952 of The Midsummer Marriage, his first opera, had marked a watershed in Michael Tippett’s development. The works that followed in the 1950s moved gradually away from the opera’s super-abundant lyricism towards a much leaner, more abrasive language, and two of Tippett’s finest orchestral works, the Piano Concerto, composed between 1953 and 1955, and the Second Symphony, which followed two years later, marked crucial stages in that stylistic shift.

Neither is among the best known of Tippett’s works. There’s a handful of recorded versions of each, including an earlier version of the concerto with Steven Osborne as soloist, and one of the performances of the symphony conducted by Tippett himself. But brought together in these first-rate accounts from concerts that Edward Gardner conducted in London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2023 (the concerto) and 2024, the two works bring the shifts in Tippett’s musical language into sharp focus. Even in the piano concerto the lyrical episodes have a hard crystalline edge, and even that has almost entirely disappeared in the symphony.

Artwork for Tippett: Piano Concerto; Symphony No 2 Photograph: No Credit

The recorded balance between the piano and the orchestra is not always ideal; it’s the solo flute rather than the piano that dominates the opening bars, and there are a few later moments when Osborne’s wonderfully crisp, lucid playing is not as far forward as it might be. But otherwise the concerto teems with detail, and in the finale – a final look back to The Midsummer Marriage’s Ritual Dances – the energy of the music is irrepressible, just as the pounding rhythms and intricately meshing string-writing of the Second Symphony (arguably the most coherent of Tippett’s works in the form) are superbly delivered by Gardner and his orchestra.

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