Simon Rattle conducts Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time”

It is one of the most significant oratorios of the 20th century: Michael Tippett’s A Child of our Time. Based on a story from the Nazi era, the work is a call for humanity and justice. The concert also includes the premiere of Brett Dean’s The Last Days of Socrates – another innovative work whose aim is to breathe new life into the genre of the oratorio. Simon Rattle conducts.

From Berliner Philharmoniker musician to internationally renowned composer – that’s Brett Dean’s career in a nutshell. In the process of arranging and improvising, the Australian-born violist discovered the composer in himself. His clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music, chosen for the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, and the ballet One of a Kind brought him international renown.

Encouraged by their success, Dean decided in 2000 to devote himself principally to composition. Ties to his old orchestra have nonetheless remained intact. Berlin audiences may well remember his orchestral work Komarov’s Fall, which the Philharmoniker commissioned. That makes it all the more gratifying that yet another new work by Brett is given its first performance at this concert.

Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, by contrast, was not commissioned. The English composer felt compelled by a real-life event to write it in protest against dictatorship and racism. In 1938 a 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, was provoked by the anti-Semitic treatment of his family to shoot a secretary at the German embassy in Paris. The attack provided the Nazis with a pretext for the pogrom in Germany known as Kristallnacht. Tippett’s musical treatment of the Grynszpan incident follows the oratorio concept of Bach and Handel. Ever since the work brought about his artistic breakthrough in 1944, Tippett has taken his place alongside Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten as one of the leading English composers of the 20th century.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Sir Simon Rattle

Rundfunkchor Berlin