The Ice Break

Splintered and rich in reference as Tippett’s operas are in their music and in their text, they carry at their heart a glowing confidence in the power of human beings to find a centre and, from that centre, to sing. In The Ice Break that confidence has a global reach. The settings are anonymous: an airport lounge, a hospital, the street. For the first time since The Midsummer Marriage, Tippett uses a chorus, here to represent the mass of humanity, whose divisions are pointed in the central cast: divisions between generations, between sexes, between races, between exile and native. Lev arrives in a new world to join his wife Nadia, who had emigrated with their baby son, Yuri. Also at the airport are Yuri’s girlfriend Gayle and her friend Hannah, there to meet the black ‘champion’, Olympion together with his fans. Out of a series of violent tensions, individual and collective, there develops a riot in which Olympion and Gayle are killed and Yuri is near-fatally wounded. Nadia dies peacefully. During an interlude in which a group attempts a psychadelic ‘trip’, the messenger, Astron, is mistaken for God – a claim he dismisses ironically. Yuri is operated on by Luke, a young doctor, and, released from the cracking plaster, he finds reconciliation with his father. (Paul Griffiths)