| SIR JOHN TAVENER, who was unable to attend the première of his new Requiem in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, owing to a serious heart condition, was deeply disappointed not to do so.
Written to a commission from the Liverpool Culture Company for the newly energised Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and its resplendent chorus under their young Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, the work’s rich verbal imagery harnesses with Sir John’s urge to reconcile what he sees as needlessly “warring” religions (witness his majestic work The Beautiful Names, performed recently at Westminster Cathedral).
This quest reflects his own personal yearning to make art and music a contribution to the healing process, which has made him — like his fellow composers Tippett or the late Malcolm Williamson — something of a philosophic and religious pilgrim; while the new work’s overall tenor meshes with Liverpool’s role, as 2008 European City of Culture, as “a vanguard for religious tolerance”, overcoming Catholic-Protestant and other cultural divides.
Abbreviating the Requiem text to just five sections, Tavener places his emphasis on two soloists, soprano (Elin Manahan Thomas) and tenor (Andrew Kennedy), who are allocated texts by Islamic and Hindu authors spanning the ninth century BC to the 19th century AD, and a cello soloist whose meanderings, by turns passionate and serene, symbolise the human soul’s struggling aspiration to achieve unity with God.
The chorus’s shrewd training by the chorus master, Ian Tracey, was already evidenced by a skilled and sensitive performance of ten sections from Rachmaninov’s All Night Vigil or Vespers, which uses the composer’s own invented (“conscious-counterfeit”) chants alongside Greek, Ukrainian, and Russian chants, and culminated in a final joyous burst invoking the Queen of Heaven (“Voevode, raduisya, nevesta Neneverstnaya”). Low basses had a field day.
In the Tavener also, the choir generated terrific results, not least in the seventh movement’s demanding and drawn-out final crescendo, a susurration of Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic kindred lines of text, which unfold a stupendous climax before subsiding. Few will forget the momentous, centrally placed Dies Irae, marked “awesome, apocalyptic” and “with searing intensity”, underpinned by drums and frenzied brass and strings (spaced out geographically so as to be arranged in a “vast cruciform” to exciting effect).
The profoundest musical insights stemmed from Tavener’s two soloists. Led in by cello and evocative bells, the soprano intones, with wide-interval leaps, the rapt words of a 12th-century Indian poetess, “I have fallen in love with the Beautiful One, who knows no death, decay, beginning or end, and is formless. . .”, before blocked brass links “Ad te omnis caro veniet” to a wonderful tenor solo, setting the 13th-century Sufi mystic Jalal Ud-din al-Rumi’s words “One I seek, one I know, one I see!”
Then, as the Dies Irae explodes, Andrew Kennedy could be heard (just) evoking the “cosmic dance” of the goddess Kali, a sort of black-tinged Brahminic Song of Songs-cum-four horsemen of the Apocalypse, likened by Tavener to “almost tantric adoration and extinction”.
Against chorus Kyries, the two soloists sing words by two 19th-century Hindu sages, short and pertinent, deliberate short brushstrokes on a large canvas, insufficient to furnish any weighty philosophical structure, and yet graphic enough to impel the audience to reflection and perhaps a kind of readjustment.
Whether or not Josephine Knight’s urging, pleading solo cello line succeeded in nursing us towards primordial light, it was certainly not for lack of trying. Like The Whale, Tavener’s cheerful late-1960s musical marathon recorded on the Beatles’ Apple label, this epic and searing 35-minute Requiem seems destined for the BBC Proms and the Royal Albert Hall.
|
back to Arts
previous story
|
next story 
%231%23.gif "Wordl Vision Sponsor a child Nov to Dec campaign © site")
