Tippett's first two symphonies are essentially abstract works, but they both have connections with the operatic works which he was on the brink of writing. Both Symphony No. 1 and his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, were formulated over a long period- conceived, in fact, during the Second World War. They share the same radiance, the same striving towards an ecstatic lyricism, as well as a mixture of tension, magic and ceremony.

The symphony came into prominence in Tippett's immediate plans just before he was imprisoned in 1943 as a conscientious objector. His letters from prison mention the work gestating inside himself which he was eager to write down once he was released. Tippett completed the symphony in 1945 and its was first performed in November that year by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent.

The work utilised a standard orchestra, but demands three flutes (who also double on piccolos) and three trumpets: these extras are there not simply to provide more power, so much as to participate as extra strands within a predomnantly contrapuntal texture. They stand out particularly in the slow movmenet, where the three flutes have an episode of their own, and in the scherzo, where the three trumpets are highlighted amid a kaleidoscopic play of contrasts.

Tippett's delight in counterpoint imparts a special character to the opening sonata-style movement. But one thematic idea - starting as high string-writing in four parts - is sufficiently chordal to provide moments of repose in a context of busy contrapuntal activity.

The second movment opens with an eight-bar ground-bass theme in B minor played by bassoons and strings. Against the eleven repetitions of this theme which follow, we hear a succession of thematic exchanges, sometimes alotted to single instruments, but occasionally elaborating into full orchestral statements. Often the ground-bass migrates into the centre of the musical texture.

Tippett's fascination with the typical Beethovenian scherzo with its one-in-a-bar pulse is manifest in the third movement, here, whose hiccuping rhythms were suggested to him by some medieval vocal music by Perotin. Its trio, for string alone, enables a more cohesive kind of counterpoint to unfold.

The finale is a double fugue, bringing together the vibrant energy of the opening movement, the rhetorical passion of the slow movement and uninhibited high spirits of the scherzo. Yet if it seems to be aiming towards a Beethovenian apotheosis, the listener is in for a surprise: for this discourse is repeatedly interrupted by loud thumps on the bass-drum and timpani - a coup de theatre that causes the fugue to lose its impetus: and as the drum beats become more insistent and the trills it sparks in reaction move higher and higher, the symphony is suddenly halted on a sustained unison E played by the lower strings - ending thus with more expectancy than resolution.