Tavener reviews

Compare and contrast: that’s one of the themes of this new King’s Consort disc, where five pairs of composers setting the same text are lined up alongside one another for aural inspection. The results can be strikingly different. Half a century separates William H Harris’s setting of the John Donne prayer Bring us, O Lord God from James MacMillan’s, and it shows. The lush, undulating eight-part textures of Harris bespeak a comfortable spiritual assurance, while MacMillan’s response is fierier, with darker, at times unsettling harmonic shadings.

These performances, last issued about 17 years ago in Carlton’s BBC Radio Classics series, were recorded at the Proms in September 1979 (Folk Songs) and August 1981. This latter performance was my proper introduction to Tavener’s work. I had heard his 1966 modernist fantasia, The Whale, but his music had changed radically, and the Requiem caught me off-balance.

You can listen in stereo, but Towards Silence really comes into its own on the multichannel SACD layer, where the work’s quadraphonic deployment of four string quartets (plus Tibetan temple bowl) is truly immersive, more closely approaching the effect of what Tavener calls ‘liquid metaphysics’ than the conventional concert experience. 

The main points of interest here are the premiere recording of Three Holy Sonnets and the fact that this programme grew out of the first concert in Iceland consisting entirely of Tavener’s music, which featured the premiere of Schuon Hymnen, dedicated to the Swiss Sufi Frithjof Schuon, whose syncretist religious philosophy inspired new directions in Tavener’s music at the turn of this century.

Transcriptions have a venerable and respectable history: from Bach downwards, many composers readily adapted their own and others’ works for different instruments, with musically successful results. Nevertheless, since (one assumes and hopes) composers think carefully about the peculiar characteristics of the instruments they score for, a change of instrumentation will inevitably affect the character of the music.

The main piece here is the premiere of Tavener’s Requiem, recorded in Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral in February 2008. It’s performed in a cruciform configuration with the cello (representing God’s ‘primordial white light’) in the centre; choir and brass in the east; strings, treble and tenor in the west; percussion north and south. The audience sits ‘inside’.

Excellent accounts of some of the best of Tavener’s Orthodox/Byzantine-influenced works, full of mystery and serene faith. Barry Witherden

Tavener is celebrated for his choral works, most of which are very appealing to the public, so it is to Naxos's credit that they are issuing this recital of his complete piano music, less well-known and considerably less commercial. Tavener has been composing solo piano music since 1977: Palin, written around the time that he formally joined the Orthodox Church, still carries echoes of his earlier modernist style, yet nonetheless looks forward to the spiritual manner of his mature works. Its title refers to its palindromic form.

When The Repentant Thief first appeared on disc well over a decade ago my feeling was the neither the ritualized repetition nor the interspersed Greek dance episodes really came off. What a difference a performance makes! When you have musicians who give themselves up to the Tavener ethos as enthusiastically as Andrew Marriner and Michael Thomas it all comes to life. Simplicity and repetition become charged with meaning. A tiny change in the shape of a phrase or a chord sequence carries surprising emotional weight.