Michael Dunganreviews Temenos 08in Co Louth which celebrated the music of John Tavener
This three-day, three-concert festival celebrating the music of John Tavener was the brain-child of Eamonn Quinn and his two-year-old Louth Contemporary Music Society. The LCMS has already been hugely successful in attracting large audiences to events featuring the composers Terry Riley and Arvo Pärt, after whom John Tavener continues a natural progression.
Like Riley, the "father of minimalism", Tavener (born in 1944) prefers simple ideas and repetition over complexity and development. Like Pärt, he infuses his music with a profound spirituality, predominantly inspired - also like Pärt - by the Orthodox Christianity to which he converted in 1977.
But what is probably the most important common trait, certainly with Pärt, is Tavener's popular appeal. He connects not only with classical concert-goers and fans of new music, but also with people who might normally prefer the cinema or staying at home over going to the concert hall.
He was already drawing that kind of following when a little piece - Song for Athene- was sung at the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997 and even more firmly established him as someone whose music could tap into the spiritual longing of anyone who chose to listen. Contained within those six minutes of Song for Athene, performed at the festival's second concert by the superb English chamber choir Polyphony in the resonant acoustic of Dundalk's St Patrick's Cathedral, are many staple features of the Tavener style. Things such as deep, long-held pedal-notes, simple scale-like melodic movement, uncomplicated harmonies occasionally leavened with a single bitter-sweet dissonance, a switching back and forth between major and minor, slow tempos, and lots of repetition: these are some of the chief compositional tools over which Tavener has attained his deceptive mastery.
They are also what divides the listening public, for his appeal is not unanimous. New Yorkercritic Andrew Porter's remarks about the 1979 premiere of the opera Thérèsecould equally apply to many of the 21 Tavener pieces presented during this festival: "It is impressive, and much of it is beautiful. But at times one feels that Tavener has found all too easy a formula for distilling ecstasy. And the piece requires submission to the repetitions and slow pace of a rite." How far you entered that submission determined your response to this festival.
The programme opened in St Peter's Church of Ireland, Drogheda, with the famous The Protecting Veil, "an attempt to make a lyrical ikon in sound, rather than in wood", says Tavener. The solo cello, played with deep commitment by Marta Sudraba, represents the Mother of God in an unceasing melody, while the accompanying string orchestra - here, the Ulster Orchestra under Tõnu Kaljuste - alternates between warm, sustained chords and occasional clustery flashes of light with an almost Petroushka-like jollyness.
It was the Polyphony concert which offered the most persuasive championing of Tavener's music. Partially to do with the cathedral's resonant, ecclesiastical acoustic, and partially the mix of choir with other forces, I felt that it was above all the expressive intensity and technical excellence produced by conductor Stephen Layton that made the strongest case for the composer. Famous pieces such as The Lamband Funeral Ikossounded fresh, spontaneous and sincere, while the short Hymn to the Mother of Godfor double choir had a mesmeric quality in its canonic echoing. This concert also featured the premiere of O My People, commissioned by Eamonn Quinn for LCMS, a poignant treatment of a Byzantine text in which a bewildered Jesus asks how the life he lived could have offended those he came to save.
Yeats is among Tavener's favourite poets and featured in two works. Words from Antigone, A Needle's Eye, The Circus Animals' Desertionand others featured in the 2003 Supernatural Songs with the Ulster Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Doreen Curran. Her approach seemed to be to subsume herself in the music and become part of its great flow.
Soprano Patricia Rozario took rather a more proactive role in the 1983 To a Child Dancing in the Windwith the Oriel Trio (flute, harp and viola). It was most unfortunate that the text was unavailable, though this was considerably compensated for in Rozario's extraordinarily vivid expression.
If the second concert was the most persuasive, the last had the best balance, including as it did other composers - Valentin Silvestrov in the muted counterpoint of his Ikon for string quartet, the Tavener- influenced sombre sound-world of Alexander Knaifel in An Autumn Evening, and the famous Fratresof Arvo Pärt - and featuring two ensembles, Irish string quartet Rothko 4 and American four-voice vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, here making their Irish debut.
They mixed pieces by Tavener, such as The Lord's Prayerand The Bridegroom,with plainsong they had unearthed from a 14th- century Irish manuscript (the Dublin Troper) and medieval songs in faux-bourdon carol-style with their ornate yet simple melodic lines and parallel-moving lower parts. These gems, exquisitely performed, were among the festival highlights, inadvertently challenging the music of John Tavener to survive as many centuries as they have.
