CLASSICAL MUSIC : Tippett's tears from the heart

THE National Theatre once per- formed a play about Benjamin Britten with a scene, backstage at a recital, where he shrank from the proferred kiss of his lover Peter Pears. "Not in the Wigmore Hall!" snapped Britten, purse-lipped as he smoothed the creases from his tail coat. The Wig- more instantly acquired the reputation of a passion-killer: a place of culturally conditioned prophylaxis where the wayward feelings of not wholly on-the-straight-and-narrow artists were brought into line.

The truth, though, is that it has always been the opposite: a sort of safe house where things could be said and done, as it were, among friends, with a liberating intimacy you wouldn't find in any other hall. And so it was that after the concert for his 90th birthday, Sir Michael Tippett stood on the Wigmore stage and wept. Well, it was an emotional occasion. But specifically the tears were in response to his own music: the song cycle The Heart's Assurance, which had been premiered in this very hall years before (in 1951, by Britten and Pears as it happens) and was sung on Monday, very effectively, by Martyn Hill with Andrew Ball, piano.

Now the first thing to be said about The Heart's Assurance is that it is a great work: one of the finest song cycles in the English language and central to what history will probably judge the richest period of Tippett's creativity. It was written in themiddle of The Midsummer Marriage and stands in relationship to that first, flagship opera like a satellite. The mood is ecstatic (except for the last song, which intensifies into a solemn, Beethovenian weight of address), the voice stretched across toccata-like piano figurations that make texture through sheer business of movement; while the image that connects the texts - of love dancing on the precipice of death - is taken deep into the music. It isn't difficult to come out of this score unsettled and disorientated by its paradoxically invigorating pathos.

But an author's tears, in front of an audience, are something else. Though potentially rather tacky, in Tippett's case they reveal the unselfconscious candour which is one of his more engaging qualities. Time and again you find in Tippett things you'd rather not, often of miraculous invention compromised by silliness or sheer bad taste. But they also tell of a mind too preoccupied with great issues or visionary prospects to care very much about niceties of taste. He writes with a take-it-or-leave-it frankness; and you take it - down to the last, nauseating urban cliche - because the infelicities are part of the deal. They are a condition of the genius that occasionally bursts out elsewhere.

The rest of Monday's birthday concert included guitar music from the young Australian virtuoso Craig Ogden, some Purcell vocal settings (a profound in- fluence on Tippett's own) and the cantata Boyhood's End, which Tippett wrote in the Forties - again, for Britten and Pears. It was a small-scale celebration: the big festivities don't begin until February - when the LSO launches a birthday festival at the Barbican and we'll hear nothing but Tippett for weeks on end.

One glaring omission from all the tributes is a proper response from the record industry. Britten was fortunate in having a relationship with Decca, who issued almost everything he wrote. Tippett has had nothing comparable, and there are classic recordings of central works in his output still unavailable on CD - or on any format at all. A magnificent L'Oiseau Lyre LP of Philip Langridge singing Boyhood's End and The Heart's Assurance has long been gathering dust in Decca's basement. Worst of all , you can't get The Midsummer Marriage because years ago the tapes were licensed to a small company called Lyrita, which has so far failed to release them. With the arrival of the 90th birthday of our most eminent living composer, it's time these record companies smartened up their acts.

Apart from Tippett, another name that we'll be hearing plenty of in 1995 is Robert King. King seems to have taken personal control of the Purcell tercentenary celebrations - and without wasting any time about it, either. The tercentenary doesn't fall until November, but already he has produced a very readable book (Henry Purcell, Thames & Hudson, £18.99), issued a complementary series of recordings on Hyperion, conducted a New Year's Day Purcell programme at the Banqueting Hall, Westminster (televised l ive on BBC2), and is half-way through his own Purcell Festival at the Wigmore Hall. When, you wonder, does he sleep?

The fifth concert in the Wigmore festival happened on Thursday, when a sold-out house suggested that all this industry is paying off. The tercentenary could yet become our own, British equivalent of Mozart Year - there's certainly a growing awareness of the breadth of Purcell's genius, beyond the handful of repertory items that have carried his reputation in the past. Thursday's programme, featuring the King's Consort, was a winner, devoted to music written for the Chapel Royal in the 1680s and with wall-to-wall masterpieces in the second half. Using much the same forces as Purcell would have done (20 voices, eight instruments), in much the same size space and at the peculiarly high pitch that prevailed at the Chapel Royal, this performance got as close as possible to how the music must have originally sounded. And though the vocal blend was raw (especially among the trebles, who were drawn from different choirs) it made the point that 17th-century choirs pre-dated David Willcocks and had not discovered Anglican cathedral tone. With vigorous, exciting singing, glorious music and engagingly informed asides from King himself, I'd recommend this series heart-ily - if you could only get a ticket. Every night, apparently, is sold out. So it's returns or nothing.

`Purcell Festival': Wigmore, W1, 071-935 2141, continues Thurs.