Our re-release of the 1992 recording of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time is Disc of the Month in this new wave of additions to Chandos’ ongoing Hickox Legacy series.

Recreating in contemporary terms a traditional genre in Western music, one that goes back to the Lutheran Passions of J.S. Bach and the great Old and New Testament oratories of Handel, and drawing on the familiar musico-dramatic conventions of the genre – recitative, aria, ensemble, chorus, chorale, and the continuous presence of the orchestra – Tippett both re-affirms and transforms the genre. The most striking and brilliant transformation is the composer’s choice of the Negro Spiritual in place of the congregational hymn, or chorale.

This oratorio, composed between 1939 and 1941 and premiered in 1944, was born out of a very personal sense of human deprivation and hardship. During the hard times in England in the thirties Tippett had shared his choral craft with community workers, and during the war he inspired unemployed professional musicians and amateurs as a choral and orchestral conductor at Morley College.