Daring to Ask the Big Questions

“A Child of Our Time” is a work of political and moral conscience, a courageous work questioning war and violence during the midst of its worst horrors. The composer, Michael Tippett, who served a jail sentence in London for his conscientious objection during War II, astonishingly premiered his pacifistic oratorio in 1944. Equally astonishing, this decidedly quirky, naive if noble, oratorio has entered into the British choral tradition.

But does anyone else particularly care about it or the disturbing issues it raises these days--especially in an entertainment capital where the conscience can be cared for by smug, simplistic war and Holocaust feel-good movies?

Big questions, important questions. And in an act of daring in its own right, the Los Angeles Philharmonic asked them along with a performance of “A Child of Our Time” on Saturday night. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion there was a Tippett performance during the day at the nearby Colburn School, a Philharmonic-sponsored conference on music and conscience in the 20th century.

If we are to judge by attendance (piddling at the conference, unimpressive at the concert), issues of conscience are a low priority among orchestra audiences. If we are to judge by the unanimous disinterest in the conference by the Philharmonic players (to say nothing of their lower-than-usual standard of playing), this appears one morally indifferent orchestra. And if we are to judge by the insignificant promotion, the Philharmonic is an apathetic arts bureaucracy.

But, despite it all, the Philharmonic proved, in the morning and afternoon sessions, the rare arts organization willing and able to probe its role in society unsparingly.

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The most striking problems came first when the provocative philosopher of music Lydia Goehr (whose grandfather, Walter Goehr, conducted the premiere of Tippett’s oratorio and whose father, Alexander Goehr, is a noted British composer), dismissed an artist’s conscience as “entirely uninteresting.”

Tippett’s oratorio is based upon the incident of a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynspan, killing a Nazi official and the horrible Nazi retribution of Kristallnacht that followed. Grynspan had violently lashed out against the persecution of his family; Tippett suggests that however morally justified that violence may have seemed, it only proves that violence begets worse violence.

“A Child of Our Time” considers that violence in a painful journey full of lumpish missteps, a struggle and often muddle of musical and philosophical ideas expressed in the composer’s own gawky, Jung-laden libretto. Its sincerity, though, is never in question and its radiance at the end is so exceptional and so hard-won, that a listener can be overcome.

Goehr, however, struck at the heart of our responses to it. Her unanswered question: “Does listening to ‘A Child of Our Time’ give us more pleasure in our compassion than give us compassion?” The fact that Tippett was a great composer (my words) and a decent man, she implied, does not necessarily make his oratorio morally superior to, say, the Holocaust schlock of “Schindler’s List.”

Another controversy: Tippett, in wanting to universalize the oratorio, chose to include African American spirituals in place of the chorales found in Bach’s oratorios. These are very beautifully--and again, very sincerely--realized, but they are also worrisome. Musicologist Philip Brett pointed out the touchy aspect of what, in today’s world, can seem like cultural appropriation. And today’s world, as both musicologist Susan McClary and composer Anthony Davis (for whom “music is a political act”) insisted, still does not properly acknowledge the contribution African American music has made to the Western canon. Even the conductor Roger Norrington expressed, on a panel, a concern that Tippett was “turning spirituals into early-afternoon tea.”

On to the performance, where these issues resonated in not always happy ways, as if to confirm a remark at the conference by the composer Martin Bresnick that “the relationship between ideology and conscience is not always happy.” The Philharmonic turned the first half of the program over to the Gwen Wyatt Chorale, which then proceeded to turn traditional spirituals and gospel music into so much early-afternoon tea.

The crowd thinned even before the program began (some symphony-goers left after one glance at the program), thinned more at intermission and more still as a broken stage lift delayed the start of the hourlong oratorio.

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Norrington’s performance of the oratorio was rough-hewed. Best known as a specialist in early music, he favors in Tippett the same fast tempos and lean textures that inform his historical approaches to Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. This meant a certain dramatic vigor--a compensation, Norrington suggested earlier, for the over-generalized universality that Tippett tried to give his work. But it also removed a certain weight, especially at the beginning, as the world turns to dark winter and gets stuck there.

Norrington does have a knack for realizing dancing and sprung rhythms, and Tippett had a knack for writing them (a kind of ingenious Stravinsky-ized Purcell). But, otherwise, much of the performance was four-square, the orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale dutifully tied to notes and not yet finding expression beyond them. The soloists--Faye Robinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Young and Gregg Baker--compensated, to an extent, with drama and rhapsody.

And yet, it was the spirituals (in which the Gwen Wyatt Chorale joined to good effect) that worked the best. Here, everyone seemed to feel at home. “A Child of Our Time” represents the plight of an oppressed outsider and, at least on this occasion, the spirituals offered, just as Tippett hoped they would, a music of conciliation, one as necessary now as then, whether audiences, musicians and institutions care to acknowledge it or not.