Andrew Meacham, Tampa Bay Times, 9th November 2018
“[T]he Florida Orchestra and the Florida Holocaust Museum collaborate to remember Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass,’ and uplift its victims. This weekend’s concert series, A Child of Our Time, opened Friday at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts. British composer Michael Tippett, a pacifist and conscientious objector, began writing it on Sept. 3, 1939, the day Britain and France declared war on Germany.
The orchestra, the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay and four guest soloists combined in an arresting rendition of a sweeping work that borrows on Bach’s Passions, Handel’s Messiah and the great requiems but does not resemble any of his previous work…
Tippett wrote A Child of Our Time thinking of Herschel Grynszpan, 17, whose fatal shooting of a German diplomat served as the ostensible trigger for Kristallnacht. From that jumping off point, the composer widened the lens to Jungian dimensions, reflecting on humanity’s capacity for evil…
The score asks a lot from the brass and lower strings, and they deliver.
The pace contracts and expands, segues into another spiritual (Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen), then explodes in the percussion and brass behind Deas in Go Down Moses.”
