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'The power of Tavener at his best is fully unlocked by Polyphony and Stephen Layton, whose sensitivity to the sacred and human in his music communicates in every work on this disc'
Peace, calm, the eternal, the spiritual: Tavener’s music offers balm to listeners harried by the pressures of the modern world. Nowhere does his focus on simplicity come across better than in his smaller choral works. This disc brings together a collection of the most recent: Butterfly Dreams with its fleeting images, the radiant Schuon Hymnen and the hypnotic Shûnya. In Polyphony’s flawless...
'for the Tavener devotee, among whose number I include myself, this disc is an essential survey of the composer's recent musical concerns, and contains some splendid new music'
'performed with conviction by Stephen Layton's Polyphony. His professional choir manages to convey the hypnotic serenity at the heart of Tavener's latest works, while packing a punch in their more dramatic moments, a strategy supported by Hyperion's A-grade recorded sound'
Polyphony's singing is immaculate, captured in the resonant acoustic of the Temple Church in glorious recorded sound. It's a hard man who would not be moved by this disc