At Hoxton New Music Days' Jonathan Harvey retrospective, a couple of people in the audience clutched pictures of Neil Tennant, perhaps hoping that the pop star might put in an appearance. Confusion was inevitable, for there are two Jonathan Harveys. One of them co-created the musical Closer to Heaven with the Pet Shop Boys. Hoxton's Harvey is the great mystic of British contemporary music. His work draws on Christian texts and iconography, Sufi devotional literature and Rabindranath Tagore's Hindu poetics.
Tagore's Gitanjali is the source of Harvey's remarkable Song Offerings, performed by the Wiegold Ensemble. Harvey calls it "Tristanesque", though it conveys a woman's eroticised spiritual experience of her "Lord", rather than Wagnerian sexual annihilation. Mary Wiegold's soprano swoops in rapture, while the instrumental ensemble subsumes her with lush nocturnal murmurings.
A beautiful work beautifully performed, it contrasts with the shocking austerity of Death of Light/Light of Death, an evocation for oboe, string quartet and percussion of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, an unremitting depiction of the Crucifixion. Harvey's response is dominated by a series of stomach-churning oboe shrieks to which the strings react, first in fear, then in ritual consolation.
The work is a portrait of a "dark night of the soul", to use St John of the Cross's phrase. Harvey's setting of the latter's Sobre Un Exstasis de Alta Contemplacion featured in a concert of his unaccompanied choral works. After a tentative start, the Elysian singers warmed to their material. They closed with How Could the Soul Not Take Flight to a text by the Sufi poet Rumi, a monumental chant that lurches heavenward to be answered by echoes that fade like the fallout from a spiritual explosion. Throughout, what impresses most is Harvey's assertion that spirituality transcends creed. In a fundamentalist, divisive world, what he has to say is all-important.
