To mark the Tippett centenary EMI Classics adds these three reissues to the pair of discs already available: vocal music and the Second String Quartet (the classic Pears and Amadeus Quartet recordings) and John Ogdon in the Piano Concerto and the first two sonatas.

The music selected maps the full extent of Tippett’s stylistic evolution from the radiance of the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) to the abrasiveness of The Ice Break (1977). The earliest recording, of the Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage, is well played by the Bournemouth SO under Barshai; but for more vividly characterised realisations of this marvellous music it’s better to seek out versions with vocal participation in the final stages. The Sonata for Four Horns and the pair of string works are done with greater interpretative warmth and presence.

Tippett was 82 when his recordings with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra were made and he would certainly have brought greater rhythmic elasticity to the proliferating counterpoints of the Concerto for Double String Orchestra in earlier years than he does here. It’s a strongly expressive performance nonetheless, and well matched by the fervently entwining lines of the Corelli Fantasia. Even more valuable is the only currently available recording of Songs for Dov (1970), an offshoot of The Knot Garden in which one of that opera’s main characters, the composer Dov, offers some off-beat self-analysis. Tensions between the pastoral and the urban are in the forefront, portrayed with special immediacy in the last of the three movements. Nigel Robson is a convincingly uninhibited, self-questioning Dov, and the composer steers the SCO through the music’s kaleidoscopic shifts of colour and tone with exemplary precision.

The urban dimension so prominent in Tippett’s later style is the dominant factor in The Ice Break and it’s one of the strengths of this performance that the harsh, at times lurid, quality of the textures never seems merely wilful but falls into place within the rapidly unfolding drama of social, ideological conflict. The Ice Break, centring on the disorientating experiences of a man who is more thinker than doer, can be seen as Tippett’s rather defiant response to Britten’s then-recent Death in Venice. The composer’s choice of a kind of picture-book, even cartoon-style immediacy for a subject that could sustain treatment of far greater depth may be controversial, but the piece still has a powerful impact – not least because the more reflective moments, when they come, are so satisfying. It’s difficult to imagine a better performance, or recording, than this one. The downside is that EMI provides no libretto, though the track-cued synopsis is better than nothing. No text with Songs for Dov, either.