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 ofhuman 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 airportlounge, 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: d...