This curious mixture of a programme is a precise re-creation of the concert at which Tippett's Fifth String Quartet had its first performance. Music by two of his teachers and one of his great inspirers (the absence of a Beethoven quartet to represent the other is excusable on grounds of time and the fact that Tippett's own quartet is so very deeply involved with Beethoven) is preceded by a greeting prelude that quotes both Purcell and Tippett himself. An appealing and enterprising way of framing an important premiere, but in practice I suspect it's not an experience one would want to repeat very often, certainly not nearly as often as I hope to return to Tippett's own piece.
It is quite typical of him, both in its exquisitely singing lyricism and in the fact that it is by no means a mere looking back towards his earlier lyrical phases. Here intensification of expression is often achieved by distillation, towards such a simplicity of utterance that at crucial moments the music thins sometimes to one, often to no more than two, of the quartet's voices. The point at which the distillation occurs most magically in the first movement is where the quartet splits into two duos to recall the messenger Pelegrin's music in Tippett's opera New Year. This rapt moment is one key, the other being a liquid fragment of birdsong, to the entire second movement (there are only two, playing for just under half an hour). This develops to what one can only call a carolling toccata (Purcell and Beethoven present within it), but the destination of the movement is music of an intensely eloquent bareness. As a near contemporary of the tumultuous, image-stuffed Byzantium it is astonishing, and perhaps an even finer achievement. It's no criticism of the Lindsay's beautiful performance to say that I'd love to hear what other groups make of it as well. Like the other works here it's cleanly but not clinically recorded.
R. O. Morris's Canzoni Ricertati (two from a set of six) subject faintly folk-like melodies to ingenious fugal and canonic treatment, managing to avoid sounding like minor Vaughan Williams not because Morris is so in control of his craft but because he obviously and infectiously enjoys exercising it: Tippett's own counterpoint has a touch of that quality. Charles Wood's quartet could bear quite a few hearings: the ingenious interplay of short motives in his scherzo is something that might have caught young Tippett's ear (and isn't there a half-memory of Wood's jig-finale in a punctuating idea in his pupil's first movement?). I like the way that shyly plaintive Wood sheds his reticence in the slow movement, and I've already revisited his finale more than once for his delightful dressing-up of the Irish folk-song The lark in the clear air in its best Sunday clothes. I prefer Purcell's Fantasies on viols, myself, but I imagine Tippett first heard them like this and thus they point up his Purcell-ancestry rather touchingly. So does Christopher Brown's miniature Fanfare, heard at its best not separated from the Tippett by 40 minutes of music by his elders but, after a decent pause, to end the programme as a sort of genial postlude.'