On 17 March, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Concert Choir give a 70th anniversary performance of Michael Tippett's war-time oratorio, A Child of Our Time. At the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand in London, on the 19 March 1944, Tippett's visionary masterpiece (written to his own words, on the advice of TS Eliot) was premiered, with an astonishing cast of soloists. The performance itself is a tribute to the courage and conviction of everyone who took part - the London Philharmonic, the London Regional Civil Defence Choir, the soloists, the conductor - but above all to Tippett's.
The piece was finished in 1942, but the composer was advised by the conductor Walter Goehr not to premiere it, that its essential anti-war message would not chime with the atmosphere of the country. Tippett was subsequently imprisoned for his pacifist beliefs and his refusal to take part in non-combative military duties. On his release in 1943, he set about putting on A Child for Our Time; perhaps the war-weary capital would now be receptive to the work's universalist pacifism, with its spirituals, its Jungian drama, and its revelation of the Shadow and Light of humanity's existence. And so it proved: the audience and the critics knew that they had heard a piece that managed to encapsulate and sound out the horrors they were living through, as well as the "possible healing that would come from Man's acceptance of his Shadow in relation to his Light", as Tippett describes the trajectory of the final part of the work.
One of the singers in the choir on Monday is Mervyn Bryn Jones, both of whose parents were in the Civil Defence Choir in 1944, and his father collected the autographs of all of the main performers and singers that day. Thanks to Bryn Jones for sharing this unique and resonant document of British war-time musical life with us: Benjamin Britten's signature is at the bottom - he had encouraged Tippett to pursue the premiere, and was the partner of Peter Pears, who sang the tenor solo that day, whose signature you can also see. There's also Tippett's, at the top; the alto Margaret MacArthur, who was one of Tippett's musicians at Morley College for adult education, near Waterloo, where Tippett was Music Director. And you'll also see the signatures of soprano Joan Cross, bass Roderick Lloyd, the leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, for whose services money was "somehow scraped together", as Tippett says, and the conductor Walter Goehr. As Monday's performance will show, 70 years on, Tippett's Child is still desperately and definitively of Our own Time.
• The London Concert Choir and City of London Sinfonia perform A Child of our Time and Beethoven's 5th symphony at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on 17 March.
