Michael Tippett was one of the most gifted and most inspiring figures in twentieth-century British musical life. Tippett’s oratorio and choral masterpiece, A Child of Our Time, written at the beginning of the second world war as an expression of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, has become one of his most widely known works and one which is seen to symbolise the composer’s extra-musical concerns, both political and psychological. Modelled on Handel’s Messiah, the emotional and dramatic core of the work is found in the five Spirituals, in which the suffering of oppressed peoples throughout history – from the Israelites in Egypt, via black American slaves, to the Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe – is given universal resonance. This unique recording was conducted by the composer himself when he was 85.