A major operatic rediscovery: Birmingham Opera Company’s New Year reviewed

This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time. One of the most thrilling aspects of the Tippett revival has been the discovery that his late masterpieces seem to have been fitted with a four-decade time-fuse. Works that prompted bafflement in the 1970s and 1980s, and then sat there for years looking like duds, are suddenly acquiring their targets. A quarter of a century after Tippett’s death, they’re blinking into life, locking on, and detonating in huge, psychedelic sunbursts of precision-targeted beauty and truth.

In the case of Tippett’s last opera New Year, Merlin (Lucia Lucas) is just one of a trio of otherworldly visitors – travellers in time, and possibly space – who beam down into a contemporary urban dystopia. Or do they? Perhaps they exist only in the imagination of a child psychologist called Jo Ann (Francesca Chiejina), as she despairs of the fractured society around her and struggles to help her delinquent brother Donny. New Year was greeted with a mixture of confusion and disdain when it first appeared in 1989, with the science-fiction elements, in particular, being seen as embarrassing proof that the 84-year old Sir Michael had finally lost it.

Well, that was then: the BBC had just axed Doctor Who and the notion that science-fiction was intrinsically infantile was still being articulated, in all seriousness, by educated people. This is now, and to judge from Birmingham Opera Company’s production – the first in more than three decades – Tippett must have owned a Tardis. Multiculturalism, lockdown, depression among the young and a wider sense of social decay – it’s us, and the jolt of recognition is startling. Tippett’s self-penned libretto references Goethe, William Morris and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.