“John Tavener, who has died peacefully at 69 at his home, was the single most popular British classical composer of the late 20th and 21st centuries,” reports Tom Service in Wednesday’s (11/13) Guardian (London). Tavener’s “music has become part of public consciousness, making him a unique cultural figure. When Tavener’s Song for Athene was sung at Diana, Princess of Wales’s funeral in 1997, the music’s haunting austerity was a lightning conductor for the grief of the watching millions.… When his cello concerto, The Protecting Veil, was premiered at the Proms in 1989, the effect was similarly rapturous, as Steve Isserlis’s playing transported the audience into a realm of mystical contemplation. The Lamb, a choral setting of William Blake from 1982, is another of Tavener’s most celebrated works, music that’s once heard, never forgotten, its delicate radiance realising a rapt timelessness. But Tavener was already famous before the 1980s. He was signed to the Beatles’ Apple label in the late ’60s … and he was the only classical composer of his generation to approach pop-star fame.… Tavener’s is an essentially spiritual music, but in a much more intellectually fearless way than his detractors think.… Increasingly, his music offered doubt and darkness in its evocation of that unknowable vastness instead of a comforting musical palliative.”
Posted November 13, 2013
