Tavener’s midsummer vigil to transcend the
law
23rd October 2002
Richard Morrison / The Times
IN THE most unlikely artistic partnership of the year, the intensely religious
composer Sir John Tavener has been commissioned by some of London’s
sharpest lawyers to write an enormous midsummer night’s “vigil”
— replete with tinkling bells and clouds of incense — for performance
in the Inns of Court.
The piece will run for seven hours from dusk till dawn, cost close to
half a million pounds and turn dozens of the country’s most eminent
judges and barristers into sponsors of the grooviest happening to hit
theLondonmusic scene since the transcendental heyday of the Maharishi
Yogi.
Tavener, the high priest of a compositional style known as mystic minimalism,
is no stranger to musical marathons. Many of his earlier works —
largely based on medieval Church scales known as “modes” —
last several hours. But The Veil of theTemple, which he partly unveiled
at a lecture this week, will be an epic undertaking even by his prodigiously
prolonged standards.
Running to a Tolstoyan 850 pages of full score, and dealing with nothing
less than the “Cosmic Ascent of Christ”, the complete work will
be performed twice at theTempleChurchas part of next summer’s City
ofLondon Festival. The audience is expected not only to pack the exquisite
13th-century building, tucked behind Fleet Street, but also to enjoy the
all-night vigil al fresco on big screens that will be erected in the surrounding
Inns of Court.
The work has been commissioned by the Inner andMiddleTemple, and the lawyers
have already raised £219,000 of the £431,000 needed to prepare,
perform and record it. More than 100 singers, led by theTempleChurch’s
own men and boy choristers, will sustain its eight cycles of chants, hymns
and ecstatic choral polyphonies.
The piece will also incorporate Tibetan horns and temple bells, English
folk-songs, the lighting of hundreds of candles, and even the wafting
of incense imported from a Greek monastery onMount Athos. Rarely will
the heartland of the British legal system have smelt so sweet.
The idea for the piece sprang from a remark that Tavener made to theRev
Robin Griffith-Jones, theTempleChurch’s Master, andStephen Layton,
its director of music. “I pointed out that at the time of the first
millennium, AD1000, churches were full of all-night chanting, and said
what a pity it was that modern Western music is so bereft of this,”
Tavener recalls. “They took me seriously.”
Despite his outpouring of very slow, seemingly eternal pieces, the 58-year-old
Tavener, who converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977 after a
serious illness, is best known for two comparatively short works. One
is Song for Athene, which was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of
Wales. The other is his setting of William Blake’s mystical poem,
The Lamb, which is currently gracing a television advertisement for mobile
phones, something of a surprise in view of its composer’s professed
abhorrence of Western materialism. He has also just written a song for
the Icelandic pop chanteuse Björk.
By contrast, The Veil of theTemplecould well go into the record books
as the longest vocal composition, easily eclipsing Wagner’s longest
opera, Die Meistersinger, a comparative tiddler at five hours and 15 minutes.
Tavener cheerfully admits that “an element of monotony” might
creep into proceedings, once the excitement of the first five or six hours
has worn off. “In a sense,” the composer says, “The Veil
is without beginning and without end.” Some listeners may feel the
same way.
However, Mr Layton, who will conduct the work, maintains that it has enough
magic to stop eyelids drooping, not least in its final moments. “The
soprano Patricia Rozario will prostrate herself in front of the altar
and sing a top C, pianissimo, at six in the morning — without any
breakfast,” he says.
The phrase “up with the lark” will surely never seem so apt.
Meanwhile, any Tavener fans with £200,000 to spare can be assured
of the very best seats in theTempleif they make themselves known to the
High Court judge SirRichard Aikensor Lord Justice Schiemann, the chief
fundraisers for the project.
By Richard Morrison
23rd October 2002