While running errands this morning I found my way into a used CD/records store and picked up a CD of a 1986 recording of Sir Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time. It’s in excellent condition and a very good recording: Andre Previn conducting the Brighton Festival Chorus, with Sheila Armstrong, Felicity Palmer, Philip Langridge and John Shirley-Quirk. When I sang “Child” in second year University, it was the first piece of twentieth century music I had ever encountered that was non-trivial, that addressed the heart of the twentieth century in the way the great religious works addressed the heart of previous centuries, and it brought the same sense of revelation as the poetry of Carl Sandburg, the other plays of Robert Bolt, and David Gascoyne’s overwrought but-man!-powerful passion-piece “Ecce Homo”. A recording is not the same as singing it, but it has lost nothing of its power of its jagged lyrics, its brilliant, jagged music, and the rumbling, roaring spirituals.