Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli

The Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli is regarded by many as Michael Tippett’s most perfect work. Tippett took as his starting point Corelli’s Concerto Grosso Op. 6, and describes the Corellia adagio as ‘dark and passionate’ and the ensuing vivace as exploring the brilliance of the violin. The music 'passes to and from between the dark and the light'. It also belongs in formal construction to the Purcell viol fantasies, a sequence of discrete sections of widely contrasted moods, each emerging from each other and building up to a convincing shape, but without the repeats and recapitulations of later music.

'Its radiant climax and the quiet Pastorale that follows are among Tippett’s most inspired pages. This work is Tippett’s mature complement to the Concerto for Double String Orchestra; it is the more complex statement of a composer who in the fifteen years since the Concerto had gained much in wisdom but lost nothing of his gift of lyric spontaneity.' (David Matthews, Michael Tippett: An introductory Study. Faber & Faber)

Fantasia Concertante was famously used as the soundtrack to the 1974 film ‘Akenfield’ by Peter Hall about rural life in Suffolk in the time between the wars: both capture an ecstatic love of timeless beauty.