John Tavener's music is conceived as a spiritual balm to heal the wounds of a divided and troubled world. Introducing his programme with the Endymion Ensemble, part of its Composer Choice Series, he urged the audience to "listen with the intellectual organ of the heart" and to find a way to vanquish "the demon of modernism". Tavener's concert of his own music - alongside works by Anton Webern, Arvo Part and the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen - was contemplative rather than aggressive.
Tavener's Akhmatova Songs for string quartet and soprano featured Patricia Rozario as soloist. Rozario has inspired many of Tavener's recent vocal works and she possesses a voice of extraordinary refinement and accuracy. Even in the cruelly exposed lines of these settings, which frequently soar into the voice's highest register, Rozario nearly always maintained her focused tone and technical assurance. She brought the same qualities to Hildegard's settings of visionary religious texts, O viridissima virga and Ave, generosa. Accompanied only by an austere drone, Rozario crafted a rapturous serenity.
Tavener's love of Hildegard's music is not just spiritual but aesthetic. The ornamentation in his settings of Anna Akhmatova's poetry - as well as the subdued melancholy of his Thrinos for solo cello, performed by Jane Salmon - seems to be directly inspired by Hildegard's vocal writing. But a comparison between two composers highlights the problems with Tavener's musical worldview. Although he writes his music to save contemporary consciousness from the evils of modernism, Tavener is wholly reliant on the "modernist" institutions of concert halls and recording companies for his success. Instead of listening to his music "with the heart", we listen to it as an aesthetic object, in much the same way as we listen to a Beethoven symphony. Hildegard's music was not designed as a work of art as we now understand the term, but Tavener's, for all his protestations, most definitely is.
All this isn't to deny the sheer beauty of music such as Tavener's The Child Lived, a setting of words by his spiritual advisor Mother Thekla, for soprano and solo cello. It's just to point out that the composer's project of world-renewal is necessarily doomed because his music plays the very games his philosophy tries to denigrate: a decidedly modernist contradiction.
