Healing Spring

By Christopher Porterfield

A bold Tippett opera "What is the answer?... What is the question?"

--Gertrude Stein, on her deathbed

In their ripest years some artists provide serene answers to life's perplexities.

Others, like Sir Michael Tippett, provide more pointed questions. Tippett, 74, has emerged since the death of Benjamin Britten as England's pre-eminent composer.

A longtime resident of the Wiltshire countryside, he has developed slowly, outside the avenues of musical fashion, building an angular, passionate and original style that freely jumbles, say, madrigals, blues, jagged contemporary dissonances and echoes of Schubert.

No less individualistic than Tippett's style is his fidelity to the notion that composers should deal with big social and philosophical issues. From his anti-Nazi -oratorio, A Child of Our Time (1941), through such an instrumental-cwra-vocal work as his Symphony No. 3 (1972), he has charted the precarious survival of humanistic values in a violent, technological age. This concern has been central to his operas. The Midsummer Marriage (1952) plumbed myth and folklore in search of Jungian archetypes of spiritual wholeness.

King Priam (1961) borrowed from the Iliad to examine moral choices in a time of war. The Knot Garden (1970) sorted out a maze of sexual and psychological bonds against a backdrop of freedom fighting, racism and analysis.

Now Tippett's newest opera, The Ice Break, has been given its first U.S. performances by the Opera Company of Boston (after a world premiere in 1977 at Covent Garden). Fittingly, the work is a masterly summation--not of conclusions, but of a continuing quest.

The plot condenses the turmoil of the 1960s, exploring dislocations between generations, races and cultures. Lev, a Russian dissident, joins his family in the U.S. after 20 years of imprisonment. He finds that his disaffected son Yuri is entangled through a girlfriend in a feud with a Muhammad Ali-like superstar named Olympion. The feud erupts in a ritualistic race riot in which Yuri is nearly killed. Under its impact, all the relationships in the opera are splintered into despair and confusion.

Tippett's score--dense, compact, intricate--rumbles darkly with violence and glistens with unexpected color. The choral scenes capture the shout of the mob. The solo lines sometimes soar in daring melismas, sometimes settle into softly swooping lyricism.

Unfortunately, as in his previous operas, Tippett's libretto falls short of his music. The harder he tries to be colloquial or hip, the more stilted he becomes ("What's bugging you, man?/ Cool and jivey once;/ Now, touchy and tight"). His three acts of roughly 30 minutes each are so compressed that they allow no development, leaving on the mind's eye only a flashing succession of emblems.

A perpetual cycle of death and renewal.

Yet the strength of Tippett's conception comes through despite such flaws, es pecially in the visionary final scenes. After the racial violence, an astral spirit speaks to a chorus of tripped-out hippies in the words of Jung and Shakespeare; but when they hail the spirit as a savior, he sneers, "You must be joking." No comforting re ceived wisdom for Tippett. Lev's dying wife Nadia recalls from her Russian childhood the sound of ice breaking on the rivers in springtime. As Lev and Yuri achieve a provisional reconciliation, the orchestra sounds the ice-break motif, suggesting a perpetual cycle of division and healing, death and renewal, neither hope less nor entirely hopeful.

The production was in the capable hands of the company's director, Sarah Caldwell. She staged the action scenes vividly, with swirling movement, loud speakers, sirens and flashing lights and kept the quiet moments simple and suit ably spacious in their loneliness. The cast -- including Richard Fredricks as Lev, Jake Gardner as Yuri and Curtis Rayam as Olympion -- sang with conviction. Two in particular matched the aplomb of Caldwell's conducting: Arlene Saunders, in lustrous voice as Nadia, and Cynthia Clarey, warmly sympathetic as a nurse who serves as a peacemaker.

Astonishingly, Boston's was the first professional production of a Tippett op era in this country. (Northwestern Uni versity staged The Knot Garden in 1974.) Although U.S. orchestras are increasingly taking up his instrumental works, his acceptance here lags behind even his late blooming in England. Tippett says he al ways knew it would take him a lifetime to come to artistic fruition. And, he adds, --T was always arrogant enough to know I'd get there in the end." The Ice Break emphatically confirms that he has.

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