Concert
John Tavener – Pratirùpa
Hilary Finch at the Barbican
23rd November, 2004
Stephen Layton/ECO
JOHN TAVENER’s music is an uneasy pact between time and eternity.
Compelled to exist in time, it strains and aspires to timelessness. When,
in its very making, it approaches the latter — or at least the illusion
of it — then a small miracle occurs.
When it merely serves ideas of the mind, it stumbles.
To celebrate 60 mortal, finite years of Tavener as man and musician, the
English Chamber Orchestra and Ralf Gothóni joined forces with Polyphony
and Stephen Layton for an affectionate birthday tribute. The centrepiece
was the world premiere of an ECO commission: Pratirùpa. This 45-minute
work for solo piano (Gothóni) and strings fell, alas, into the
stumbling category, making few demands of its players, yet almost unbearable
demands of endurance on its listeners.
Tavener’s programme note tells us that Pratirùpa is Sanskrit
for “reflection”, and that the work’s series of self-reflecting
resonances, harmonies, melodies and rhythms attempt “to reflect the
Divine Presence residing in every human being”.
Listen to the piece without reading the note (which takes things further
still into esoterica), and what you hear is a seemingly never-ending cycle
of non-events: a little chant-like phrase played on the piano, then tracked
and mirrored in the strings; an echo of Mozart, ditto; a sudden tantrum
of fortissimo string-bashing and ascending and descending scales on the
piano, top to bottom. Repeat this sequence 10, 20, 30 times — I lost
count — and that is Pratirùpa, a work weighed down by its
own self-indulgent inconsequence.
The evening was redeemed by Tavener at his very best, singing through
the soul of the human voice. An irresistible song-cycle called Butterfly
Dreams, written last year for the Brighton Chamber Choir, was given its
London premiere by Polyphony. Several of the songs are tiny haikus, time
brushed by the wing-tip of sound. Layton’s ability to revere and
sanctify every consonant, every syllable, within the utmost simplicity
of utterance, ensured a performance of near-perfection for both this and
for the 1982 classic, The Lamb.
Sarah Connolly, replacing an indisposed Susan Graham, tackled the Supernatural
Songs of 2002, with the ECO’s strings, pow-wow drum and Hindu temple
bowl, serenely focusing and nuancing their sweetly variegated responses
to the poetry of W. B. Yeats. And Polyphony’s concluding performance
of Birthday Sleep, a setting from 1999 of the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins,
solemnly sealed the celebration
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