Fantasia concertante on a Theme of Corelli

The stimulus for the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli was an Edinburgh Festival commission to mark the Italian composer’s tercentenary in 1953. Tippett alighted for the new piece upon a pair of passages from the second of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi Op. 6: a terse “Vivace” call to attention and an anguished, lyrical minor-key “Adagio”, which he reverses for dramatic effect. He retained the Baroque idea of juxtaposing instrumental groups of different sizes, pitting a trio of violins and cello against two larger string bodies, one equivalent to the 18th-century ripieno, the other taking the place of the harpsichord continuo. Upon this framework, and with the sylvan ravishments of his just-completed opera The Midsummer Marriage still fresh in his mind, Tippett built a rapturously unfolding sequence of variations and elaborations exploring the contrasting personalities of the two themes. Charting a path—characteristically for the composer—from darkness to light, the work distils a potent dialogue between Corelli’s Baroque manners and Tippett’s own contemporary musical language. This ecstatic sound world entered the ears and consciousnesses of the wider public two decades later when the film director Peter Hall used the Fantasia Concertante to underscore his 1974 film of Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield. Nevertheless, for all its roots in the pastoral East Anglia of the composer’s youth, the work is suffused with a radiant Mediterranean sunlight that places it somewhat outside the tradition of English string music stretching from Elgar to Britten and beyond.