Sir John Tavener has become something of an icon these days, attaining
the ultimate in respectability as Prince Charles’s favourite composer.
He is most famous for his choral music, most notably the Song
for Athene. This disc collects together a much more intimate
aspect of his output that I didn’t know existed. On first hearing
it’s a rather puzzling disc, but it repays the effort of repeated
listening, particularly with the later works.
The booklet notes, written by the performer, do
their best to contextualise each piece, which makes it rather
irritating that they aren’t arranged chronologically: there
is no good reason for this, and it breaks up any sense of charting
the composer’s development. Raat sometimes gets a little carried
away in his admiration for Tavener: for example, the piano is
“transformed into a strikingly individual, sonorous world of
chiming bells, highly lyrical melodic phrases, and recurrently,
thundering sound clouds, confronting the omnipresent silence
in the strongest possible way.” Quite.
The Eastern mysticism that Tavener has made his
own - he has been a member of the Russian Orthodox church and
imbibed its colours into his music - is present in most of these
works. He does a good job of using the instrument’s more limited
resources to achieve similar effects to those in his larger
orchestral and choral works. Yet the earlier works tread the
line between consonance and dissonance in a way I find quite
irritating. Ypakoë, for example, has a simple, profoundly
spiritual melody which is allowed to sing out towards the middle
and end of the piece. To get there, however, we have to put
up with all manner of meanderings that seemed quite purposeless
to me. Palin, his first piano work, features many instances
when one key is sounded frequently and continuously for about
10 seconds at a time. It’s meant to evoke approaching thunder,
but it just sounds tedious. Then the second half of the piece
is a mirror image of the first (the Palindrome of the title);
all very clever, but if the first half didn’t inspire you then
the second won’t either.
The lighter works on this disc, tracks 4 and 6,
are dedicated to the memory of Tavener’s cats, and they see
a return to traditional, triadic harmonies. These portraits
are affectionate and warm: we even have glissandi to represent
the pets running over the keys. Mandoodles contains
jazz rhythms and reference to a Chopin Prelude, and In Memory
of Two Cats is simple, bell-like and appealing. As with
Ypakoë, an austerely beautiful melody is allowed space
to sound. It is at moments like these that the disc is at its
best and these get their fullest flowering in Pratirūpa,
the longest and most recent work here. Influenced by the Sufi
philosophy that Tavener currently follows, it suggests that
the real essence of spirituality soars above any one religion.
The title is Sanskrit for reflection and it is in this
piece that Tavener’s mastery of musical stasis is most apparent.
There is little by way of melody here, but that doesn’t seem
to matter as the piano evokes a mood of ethereal stillness,
the higher consciousness that Sufi strives towards? The peace
is occasionally interrupted by violence, including a moment
when the pianist seems to thunder down most of the keyboard
three times. It’s here, however, that we get closest to the
religiosity of Tavener’s choral works and the evocative immobility
can be hypnotic at times.
All this suggests a sense of development in Tavener’s
style, from overt modernism through to a more sophisticated
use of harmonies in his later works. The disc - the only one
of this music? - is a welcome step in plugging this gap and
any of the composer’s fans who want to experience his broader
range shouldn’t hesitate. Performances are highly committed
and the sound is up to the usual Naxos high standard.
Simon
Thompson
