#tavenerrip
Some of us heard the Song for Athene playing in the dentist’s surgery yesterday, and this turned out to be because Sir John Tavener had died. I predict an Christmas outbreak of performances of The Lamb and perhaps also his beautiful Hymn to the Mother of God (which I only sung for the first time quite recently. I suspect that after that we’ll hear rather less Tavener, because composers tend to fall out of the repertoire immediately after they die, when they no longer tick the box of ‘contemporary music’. And then if they are lasting, they have a revival a few years later. Michael Tippett seems to be having such a revival, but Lennox Berkeley’s music (for example) has not returned in the quantities in which it was heard in the 1980’s, when he was still alive though no longer composing new pieces.
I’ve sung the standard pieces by Tavener that are in the church music repertoire, with the exception of God is with Us, which is in the repertoire at church so some chance that I’ll get to do it. Apart from that, I don’t think there is anything by him on my wishlist. The main piece of ‘holy minimalism’ that is is Pärt’s Magnificat.