Richard Bratby

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

Michael Tippett's much maligned work offers psychedelic sunbursts of precision-targeted beauty and truth

Samantha Crawford as Regan and Lucia Lucas as Merlin in Birmingham Opera Company's new production of Michael Tippett's extraordinary opera New Year. Image: Adam Fradgley 
issue 20 July 2024

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.

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