Creative into his late eighties, Michael Tippett was a heartening and colourful figure at performances and premieres, including those of his last opera, New Year (1986–8), and his setting of Yeats's Byzantium (1989–90). Farewells, when he died at the age of ninety-three, had to be celebratory.

New Year

Tippett keeps on getting younger. Just ten weeks from his eighty-fifth birthday, here he is in Texas, sportively bejeaned, taking a gentle bow after a work which, but for the modesty of the amplification and also of the scenic resources, would have to be called a rock opera. Saxophones wail, a large percussion group batters and jangles in urban syncopation, electric guitars squelch out disgust. A male vocalist, couched in an armchair with Budweiser and cigarettes, cynically leads and misleads us as master of these ceremonies. A chorus of louche modern types judders. At Houston Grand Opera it is New Year.

But it is also old Tippett, in that what we are probably to see as a black, bleak vision of the contemporary city is cracked by what we are probably to see as hope and love. It is the same story: it is most particularly the same story as The Midsummer Marriage, for though we are now at the opposite time of year, this is again the moment of collective celebration (so important to Tippett, this Greek ideal of the artist enjoining a public forum), out of which a young woman is kept by her anxieties and tightnesses.