King Priam was a great shock when it was first performed in 1962. In place of the ecstatic lyrical warmth of Tippett’s previous opera, The Midsummer Marriage, a plot drawn from the Trojan War drew from him a new and bracing style, hard-edged, disjunct and often barbaric in colour. His vocal writing also became very much more taxing. All the principal roles demand unsparing vocal intensity, precision in pitching the often very awkward intervals and, often enough, athletic flexibility. In its own way it is as difficult to cast as Il trovatore, and the fearlessness of, in particular, Harper, Minton, Palmer, Langridge and Tear is quite remarkable. But a lot more is required of the singers than merely standing up with fortitude to the demands made of them. In that way, too, this is an exceptionally fine performance. One only has to compare the ardour of Langridge’s Paris with the range from languor to ferocity of Tear’s Achilles to realize that Tippett is very far from writing all-purpose angular modernisms for both his principal tenors. Hecuba, Andromache and Helen are equally sharply characterized by the composer, and as vividly realized by these singers.
Alongside the shock at this opera’s new sound-world went a deeper shock at how poignantly moving it could be. The title-role is less spectacularly difficult than some of the others, but Priam is given many of the opera’s most telling pages, from ‘his’ motif of sonorous chordal strings (an archetypal Tippett sound) to the bare but profoundly affecting scene in which he begs Achilles for the body of his son. Bailey has just the right blend of proud dignity and vulnerability for the role, and his projection of the text is immaculate. Atherton is at his best, not just steering the cast and the orchestra past the score’s many pitfalls but searching out all the wonderfully sensuous sounds that it contains. He knows just what Tippett means by marking Paris’s love music ‘winged’ (alato, though the composer misspells it), and that is exactly how it sounds.
The performance and the clean, transparent recording are in short fully worthy of this wonderful opera. Nevertheless I hope that it will have a rival one day. A more robust tenor than the very musicianly Kenneth Bowen would make a more magical figure of Hermes. Much more important, Tippett’s virtuoso violin lines were for a long time thought unplayable by a full violin section, and they are here given, as in stage performances until recently, to a soloist. Now that we know how magnificent they sound on a dozen or more violins it’s hard not to feel cheated, brilliantly though Nona Liddell (uncredited) plays them. But I am already beginning to sound ungrateful for what, I repeat, is a remarkably fine performance.
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