Polyphony: Barbican Great Performers Series John Tavener 60th Birthday Concert (Concert Review - The Times, 2004)

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.

Hilary Finch