The San Francisco Chronicle  Santa Rosa Symphony takes on rarely heard oratorio Tippett's 'Child' a hodgepodge of musical styles April 15, 2002 By JOSHUA KOSMAN Never one to shy away from an artistic challenge, music director Jeffrey Kahane led the Santa Rosa Symphony on Saturday night in Michael Tippett's rarely heard anti-war oratorio "A Child of Our Time." The concert, at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, was by turns moving and maddening, wondrous and prosaic.  The performance warranted nothing but praise. Leading the orchestra dexterously and with the help of some vigorous solo and choral singing, Kahane mounted a powerful case for Tippett's hourlong score.  But even a performance as fine as this one must inevitably come up against the limitations of the work itself. There are reasons "A Child" is done so rarely, at least in this country, and the scale of the thing is only part of the problem. Horrified at the news of Nazi atrocities, Tippett undertook to write a contemporary piece in the vein of the great Baroque choral works. The oratorio's most notable gesture was his decision to use African American spirituals in a manner analogous to the chorales that punctuate Bach's Passions -- as structural anchors and communal expressions of faith. The presence of the spirituals surely gives "A Child" a certain emotional and moral weight -- the luminous nobility of songs like "Go Down, Moses" and "Deep River" is hard to withstand -- and it exemplifies Tippett's goal of making a universal statement about oppression.  Musically, though, it creates a stylistic duality that ends up making little sense. Tippett's moral goals may be universal, but the musical language he clothes them in are not, and the juxtaposition of spirituals with the composer's lyrical brand of modernism is incongruous at best. Then too, Tippett was artist enough to follow in the tradition of Handel and Bach but not to make something new and distinctive of it, as Britten later did in his infinitely greater "War Requiem." Consequently, some of the most obviously imitative strokes -- the Handelian fugue in "When shall the usurers' city cease?," or the use of a narrator in the piece's large central section -- seem like pale imitations of their models. Like most of the texts that Tippett set during his long career, that of "A Child" is the composer's own handiwork; and -- again like nearly all of his literary texts -- it is execrable, a tin-eared farrago of pseudo-Biblical posturing and Jungian psycho-babble ("I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole" -- as though the great moral problems of war, oppression and injustice were merely exercises in self-actualization!). Yet for all its patent weaknesses, "A Child" still has reserves of cogency and beauty that come out in a strong performance. There is vigorous sinew in much of the choral writing, and the lyrical impulse that was always Tippett's most alluring gift comes through to great effect (particularly in the woodwind introduction to the final chorus). Kahane was clearly in command of the score's many facets, bringing crispness to some of its more treacherous, angular passages and serene urgency to the spirituals. The most stirring solo contribution came from soprano Janice Chandler, following her dazzling 1999 debut in the "War Requiem" with a performance of soaring intensity and tonal grace. Tenor Richard Clement provided singing of ringing purity, and baritone Derrick Parker, after a wobbly start, grew in confidence and authority during the narrative sections. Mezzo-soprano Milagro Vargas struggled to keep her singing in focus. Admirably, the Santa Rosa Symphony took the opportunity of these performances to involve the larger community, particularly the students of Santa Rosa High School. The school choir led by Dan Earl sang splendidly during the concert, in conjunction with the Sonoma County Bach Choir led by Robert Worth. Additionally, student artists provided a dazzling array of paintings, photographs, videos and other work inspired by the Tippett score; these were on view in the lobby, and a few were projected as a kind of visual frame for the performance itself. E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com <mailto:jkosman@sfchronicle.com> .