The Midsummer Marriage – London Philharmonic Orchestra
Royal Festival Hall, London

A kind of divine madness governs Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage. Met with confusion – and no little ridicule – at its 1955 Covent Garden premiere, when audiences were baffled by a libretto that is all philosophical nods and gnomic abstractions, it quickly found more solid ground as listeners let go of their expectations and basked in the outrageous lushness of the score itself. Nearly 70 years on and we’re still not much the wiser on the drama, but musically it’s still the closest thing to ecstasy you’ll find this side of Wagner.

When a concert staging of the opera was first planned to launch the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s (LPO) autumn season – a triumphal blast to announce the arrival of new music director Edward Gardner – it must have seemed like a bold choice. But several years and a global pandemic later, the decision to bring some hundred singers (the combined forces of the English National Opera Chorus and London Philharmonic Choir) and nearly as many orchestral players together in the Royal Festival Hall was so much more than that (25 September). If the logistics made your head spin, the sound took it clean off.