I Came As a Shadow

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."

Superb 21 track, 2 CD anthology of one of the most innovative, progressive bands of the late sixties/early seventies and leading lights of the famous Canterbury scene. Features a chronological guide to their career from the first album through to their latest work…

Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time was composed between 1939 and 1942 as a direct response to the events leading up to (and including) the notorious Kristallnacht, in November 1938, in National Socialist Germany. Tippet first intended to write an opera, but quickly determined that this would inevitably be too literal, and that the (rather neglected) oratorio form lent greater scope for reflective and meditative interjections to the narrative. Hoping to persuade his friend and mentor T.S. Elliot to write the libretto, he sent the poet such an intricately detailed plan that Elliot responded by suggesting that Tippett, having thought so carefully about it, prepare the text himself – which he duly did. (He then went on to write his own libretti for all his future large vocal works).