The opening of Tippett’s Piano Concerto (1953 55) is sheer poetic magic – a low C in the depths of the orchestra over which a gentle rippling in A flat conjures the glowing natural world of his recently completed first opera, The Midsummer Marriage. The warm-sounding A flat also transforms a memory of hearing Myra Hess playing Beethoven’s Op 110 Sonata at a wartime National Gallery concert which, together with a lyrical account of the Fourth Concerto by Walter Gieseking, inspired Tippett to create his own concerto where the piano could ‘sing’ again. Steven Osborne is today’s undisputed master of this score, which as David Matthews has written ‘has come to be regarded as the outstanding piano concerto since Bartók’s Third’. Following a 2007 studio recording in Glasgow under Martyn Brabbins (Hyperion, 12/07), I’ve heard Osborne play the work with Mirga GraŽinytė-Tyla and Andrew Davis, among others, but this completely symbiotic live account with Edward Gardner’s LPO has both repose and electricity to surpass all others.

There is a wonderful photo from a gap in rehearsals for the premiere of the Second Symphony on February 5, 1958, where Tippett is smilingly sharing the score with Sir Adrian Boult, and Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams sharing the sofa with them. In a letter to Michael Kennedy, VW wrote: ‘I admired Tippett’s symphony very much, but it is very hard; one of those things that will not get a really good performance til it has been done about 10 times …’ Those performances were initially slow in coming and the difficulties are real enough. But this is a surging performance, which eats its challenges up as part of the exhilarating discourse. Gardner nails each tempo perfectly and in the finale, in particular, he succeeds in making complete sense of an elusive movement – indeed, for the first time in my own experience of many performances over the decades. The astonishing conclusion resonates with what Tippett’s champion Ian Kemp (also one of Steven Osborne’s teachers) described as ‘the strangely exalted and strangely terrifying wisdom of genius’.

Applause has sensibly been omitted from these triumphant concert performances, which allows the last chords, in each case, to linger memorably – but I now recall with wonder the prolonged and cheer-laden reception, of the Symphony in particular (and at the end of a standard concert), which seemed to confirm its acceptance, at last, as a mainstream 20th-century masterpiece and not just some niche favourite. In chronological terms this is the perfect coupling; and although the premiere recordings of both works (1965 and ’67 respectively, with John Ogdon and Colin Davis) remain classics, I have no longer any need of selected comparisons as these now sweep the board definitively. A reminder, too, of the Gramophone Award-winning The Midsummer Marriage from the same forces (A/22) which, again, set new standards. More, much more please – an indispensable disc!