Musical marathon'til the break of dawn
Friday, July 23, 2004
BY Bradley Bambarger
Star-Ledger Staff

NEW YORK – Endurance contest or ecstatic experience? However you see Sir John Tavener's seven-hour "The Veil of the Temple," it is an admirably ambitious centerpiece for the Lincoln Center Festival.

Beginning at 10:30 p.m. Saturday, "The Veil of the Temple" won't conclude until dawn on Sunday. Inspired by chant-laced Easter marathons Tavener attended in Greece, the event "isn't a concert by conventional Western standards, but should be a journey, a transcendent experience," he says.

"It's when you become totally relaxed or even tired and drained that you begin to open up, to really hear and feel," adds the 60-year-old Tavener, who lives in Sussex, England. "When you come out from 'The Veil,' as you do from all-night concerts in India or Greece, you should feel quite – to use modern terminology – high."

For "The Veil of the Temple," the main-floor seats of Avery Fisher Hall will be replaced by cushions. Audience members are also invited to make themselves comfortable with their own sleeping bags, as well as freely sit, stand, whisper and move in and out of the hall during the slowly unfolding performance. Breakfast will be provided after the climax at sunrise.

The music of "The Veil of the Temple" looks as much to the East as the West. Tavener's characteristic latter-day method mixes Eastern Orthodox liturgical ritual with chants and rhythms from Hindu and Sufi traditions. The cast features a 120-member chorus, 12-voice brass choir, organ, Indian harmonium, Armenian duduk (oboe), Tibetan horn and temple bowls.

As with the well-received "Veil" premiere at London's Temple Church, the solo voice is Tavener's soprano muse, Patricia Rozario. The conductor is again Temple Church music director Stephen Layton. Avery Fisher Hall is about the furthest venue imaginable from the medieval Temple Church – with its Knights Templars buried under effigies on the floor – but Lincoln Center promises to add meditative ambience with dramatic lighting, etc.

A young'60s modernist who signed to the Beatles' Apple label, Tavener became famous again in the late 1980s for radically simplifying his sound and emphasizing the sacred – like his peer, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Following hit concert works like the cello concerto "The Protecting Veil" and such ubiquitous Christian hymns as "The Lamb," Tavener has strived to further "empty my music of ego," even as he expands its scope with such large-scale, multi- cultural projects as "The Veil of the Temple."

Tavener has been controversial in his decrying of Western modernism's "extremes," from Beethoven to Boulez. He has also taken his share of slings and arrows, many warranted, for his idiosyncratic reconciliation of spiritual quest with modern celebrity. Still, it's refreshing to hear a contemporary composer enthuse so readily about the "love" in not only Mozart's philosophical opera "The Magic Flute," but John Coltrane's ecstatic jazz and Randy Newman's humanistic pop songs.

Tavener's approach to his faith is also evolving, he says. "The older I get, the more I realize that all forms of religion have an underlying universal truth. So much of the trouble the world is in today stems from the rigidities of specific traditions, from East versus West. Perhaps by representing that universality, art can do its part in healing the rifts."

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