Tavener reviews

Tavener reviews

Michael Stewart • Tavener: Palintropos, etc

Aruhi (piano); New London Orchestra/Ronald Corp (A Flock Ascending)
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Tavener: No longer mourn for me

Steven Isserlis (cello), Matthew Rose (bass), et al; Philharmonic Orchestra/Omer Meir Wellber (Hyperion)
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All Things Are Quite Silent

Pembroke College Girls’ Choir, Cambridge/Anna Lapwood, et al (Signum Classics)
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Rosa Mystica

Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir/Paul Spicer, et al (SOMM)
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White Light: The Space Between

O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra/Hugo Ticciati (Signum)
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The best recordings of works by John Tavener

We round up some of the greatest recordings of the British composing legend Sir John Tavener
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A Voice from Heaven: Choral works by WH Harris, MacMillan, Howells, Tavener, Stanford, Howells, Leighton, Parry, L Berkeley, Murrill & TH Jones

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.

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Cappella Nova sing Tavener and Moody

'Cappella Nova not only manage to get the notes, but surmount them with lyrical grace and very little hint of strain'
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Tavener

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.

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Path: Chamber Works by Medyulyanova, Nadarejshvili, Pärt, Tavener, Vrebalov & Yanovsky

Except for the extract from Nadarejshvili’s quartet all these pieces are receiving their premiere recording (Pärt’s Summa is realised by guitar quartet here), and all are rooted in ancient folk traditions.
 
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Tavener: Towards Silence

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. 

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Tavener: Song for Athene

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.

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Amy Dickson plays Glass, Tavener, Nyman

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.

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Tavener: Requiem; Eternal Memory; Mahashakati

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’.

 

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Tavener: The Protecting Veil; The Last Sleep of the Virgin etc

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

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Tavener: Zodiacs; Ypakoe; Palin; Mandoodles; Pratirupa; In Memory of Two Cats

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.

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Tavener: The Repentant Thief; To a Child Dancing in the Wind; Lamentation, Last Prayer and Exaltation; A Mini Song Cycle for Gina; Melina

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.

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Kancheli¥Tavener

Both the works on this disc were composed for Yuri Bashmet, the charismatic Russian viola-player whose enrichment of his instrument’s repertoire is beginning to rival the endeavours of the late Mstislav Rostropovich on behalf of the cello. Of the two pieces Kancheli’s Styx (1999), which pits the viola against a remarkable ensemble of mixed choir and orchestra, is the more immediately compelling, its yearning melodies and lush harmonies and orchestration offering many moments of ravishing beauty.
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Tavener¥Vaughan Williams

The voice of my education tells me I ought not to like Tavener’s music. How can such wilful simplicity, such refusal to ‘develop’ in any approved Western sense, be meaningful? And as for the mystical aspirations, how can they ring true in an age of Richard Dawkins and rampant, cynical materialism?
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Choral works by Britten, Byrd, Parsons, Harris, Holst, Tallis, Sheppard, Howells, Tavener and Rodney Bennett

Conductor Paul McCreesh programmed this disc to represent the soul’s journey from life through death to Paradise, using English a cappella compositions from the 16th and 20th centuries. It begins with Tallis’s Miserere Nostri and within seconds you wonder if this was wise: after such a gorgeous performance of this sublime music, surely everything else will be an anti-climax.
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Tavener: Beyond the Veil

Based on the LWT South Bank Show profile of John Tavener, this 80-minute blend of music, images and interview snippets makes an intriguingly multi-layered portrait. While there is no aggressive crossquestioning from Melvyn Bragg, nor any arch quizzical note in his commentary, this film manages to show what a paradoxical figure Tavener is. His frankness when he talks about spiritual matters is breathtaking – yet is there sometimes just a hint of a raised eyebrow? Certainly he seems aware how provocative his statements must sound in an age split between fundamentalism and crass hedonism.
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Tavener, Ireland,Rachmaninov, Sheremetiev,Britten, Lukaszewski, Lotti, Allegri,Kod‡ly, Holst, Harris & Traditional

Am I alone in unwrapping with a heavy heart any CD fronted by a soft-focus, candle-lit, church-esque picture, emblazoned in the largest possible font, ‘Allegri Miserere’? In this case, dear listener, press on, for the packaging does the content no justice. The programme is a potpourri, and one from which emanates the refined scent of the collegiate choir, à la King’s or Trinity. The tuning is impeccable, the blend unimpeachable. Director Nigel Short was a member of the King’s Singers for seven years, and their signature soft fuzziness of tone plays a part in the Tenebrae sound.
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Rachmaninov; Holst; Part; Kalinnikov; Chesnokov; Stravinsky; MacMillan; Tavener

There are 29 singers listed in the booklet, giving a rather bigger and more unfettered sound than usual from this group. Not surprising, perhaps, given the meaty Russian-ique programme. In fact, the repertoire is broad church, with MacMillan and Holst sitting alongside Tavener, Rachmaninov and the lesser known, but ravishing, delights of Chesnokov. A dark gold Orthodox light permeates all the performances, which lends a consistency to the whole programme. It is music in a continuous state of exaltation – from open-mouthed awe to ecstatic joy.
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Tavener: Lament for Jerusalem

The title may have all sorts of uncomfortable resonances today, but John Tavener’s Lament for Jerusalem is in fact a meditation on an age-old theme. Jerusalem the Holy City of three different faiths becomes the archetypal sacred place: a real location in which one may encounter the Divine. So why a lament? Because what Tavener calls ‘the endless and despairing ugliness’ of modern life – religious as well as secular – shows how estranged we have becomes from the truly sacred. So we hear Jewish, Christian and Muslim (Sufi) texts in which love and grief intermingle.
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