'Tavener Celebrates Motherhood' - 1.07.03

[CD Pre-release: ‘Mother and Child’] July 2003, Gramophone Magazine

The austere, peaceful and reflective ambience of the Temple Church, in a courtyard within London’s Inns of Court, makes a fine setting for a disc of contemporary sacred music, sung by Tenebrae. The church achieved a recording landmark when Sir George Thalben-Ball and soloist Ernest Lough made a world-famous recording of Mendelssohn’s Hear my Prayer here in 1927. Three-quarters of a century on and it is preparing for another milestone in June, when Sir John Tavener’s epic seven-hour commission for six choirs The Veil of the Temple will be performed here from dusk until dawn. The Tavener work receiving its premiere recording today, however, is more modest in scale, at under 13 minutes. The choir, led by Nigel Short, are recording within the cavernous Round Church (built in 1185, 55 years before the chancel, though both were badly bombed in the Second World War). Its acoustics serve the piece well, giving the loud, slowly expanding sections a space-filling quality. For his text, Tavener took a poem (written by a friend, Brian Keeble) about a mother and her child playing. The text is a celebration of the spiritual bond between them. ‘I think it is a religious text,’ says Tavener, ‘but it needed a kind of a relief from the regular set of poetical phrase’. So he added a refrain – ‘Hail Maria, Hail Sophia’ – after each verse, which he says accentuates both the feminine and religious aspects of the work.

Despite the Christian connotations of its text, Tavener sees it as a universally spiritual work. ‘I write music that is universal… that’s not specifically Christian, that’s not specifically Hindu, that’s not specifically American Indian.’ The Eastern flavour is enhanced by the use of a Tibetan temple gong, which – after some suggested changes of beater by Tavener – creates a poignant and powerful effect. The recording team are able to amplify it above the choir and organ, though Tavener ponders how best to achieve the desired effect when the work is given its performance premiere, at the Salisbury Festival (in the Cathedral, by candlelight) in June. He things the choir and organ would drown out its sound – its normal usage, within Buddist or Hindu ritual, would be within a far more intimate setting.

The disc, which will take its title from the Tavener work, will contain 10 pieces in total, all by living composers, and several of them premiere recordings. The other nine works are by Jonathan Dove, Philip Moore, Francis Pott, Giles Swayne, Alexander L’Estrange, Jeremy Filsell and two tracks from Richard Rodney Bennett. The disc – released on June 6 – will also launch Signum’s new contemporary music imprint, Signum 2