Supplement for Blog on article for Parish News on Sir John Tavener

An excellent recording of The Lamb is available on the CD ‘John Tavener: Song for Athene, Syvati, and other choral works’, sung by the Choir of St John’s College, directed by Christopher Robinson (Naxos 8.555256). The same performance is available on YouTube (at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJfAaa7RBg8&feature=fvw ): this has the advantage for those who read music of showing a version of the score (unfortunately not entirely accurate) as the music proceeds. Among other YouTube performances is that by Chichester University Chamber Choir in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI98RItS-bY&feature=related ). Try iTunes for other Tavener performances.

The Naxos CD referred to above includes a wonderful setting of The Lord’s Prayer. This is very leisurely even by Tavener’s standards at about three and a half minutes, given that the text is sung through once only, with repetition. The treble part is in slow equal notes, the opening pattern being repeated more or less throughout. Against many of these long treble notes other voices create dissonances, each of which resolves, so that there is a special kind of melancholy tenderness; overall the work is a subtle blend of traditional and 20th-century harmony.

[Note on preceding paragraph: A ‘dissonance’ is a discord. Use of dissonance may therefore sound threatening or unpleasant – but most music employs dissonance in carefully controlled ways to create welcome tension (too many ordinary chords are a bit like a meal without salt, herbs or spices). Sometimes dissonance plays a vital part in intensifying the effect of highly-charged words. For example Bach used dissonance plentifully in the ‘Crucifixus’ section of his B minor Mass.]

The CD also features a setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. Settings of these texts abound, and are regularly used in cathedral-style Choral Evensong. Among the best known are those by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (18521925), including the B flat setting (‘Stanford in B flat’), and Herbert Howells (18921983).

Settings by Stanford and Howells, and indeed most others, are for choir and organ. Tavener writes for voices only, avoiding instruments as is standard practice in Greek Orthodox worship. Indeed, although Tavener sets the familiar Prayer Book texts, we enter a very different sound world from that familiar to people accustomed to Stanford and Howells (not least because of the characteristic low held notes or ‘drones’ of Greek Orthodox tradition).

Moreover, the Magnificat is punctuated by repetitions of a Greek Orthodox refrain addressed to Mary:

‘Greater in honour than the cherubim, and glorious incomparably more than the seraphim: thou who inviolate didst bring forth God the Word, and art indeed the Mother of God: thee do we magnify’.