Unlike in his famous encounter with Mozart, Emperor Joseph II never would say to this composer, “Too many notes, Tavener.” In The Veil of the Temple, a two-and-a-half-hour condensation of his (shudder) eight-hour All-Night Vigil, John Tavener spreads a too-small amount of musical material over a too-vast time-span. The work is scored for choruses, solo voices, a few bells and gongs, with Tibetan horn to mark boundaries in the music, and near the end, a brass ensemble.
The sound is almost uniformly lovely, but static. The music rejects the ideals of personal expression and dramatic development that have prevailed since secular art music emerged in Europe. While listening to it, I knew that I had essentially heard it all before, in the guise of Tavener’s opera Maria Egiziaca. These nearly interchangeable pieces have similar long-held notes, slow vocal lines in Eastern Orthodox-like modes, and lots of literal repetition. But don’t worry. The 70-page program book tells you what to get out of this music: “The purpose…is to awaken, through music, some realisation of what is meant by man’s being created in the Divine Image.” But if you don’t buy into the illusion of holiness that the program notes suggest, then the rudimentary tunes and chants are just too reminiscent of the stuff that gets played on university FM stations around 11 pm on Saturdays. In England they regard Tavener as profoundly spiritual. In America we call such stuff “Space Music”.
On the other hand, decide that this music is not for listening in the way we attend to most concert music and The Veil of the Temple can work as advertised. The music makes its very slow ascent through a Byzantine scale, the sound echoes in the mysterious resonance of the round Temple Church in London, and toward the end, when the brass joins, you might accept it as symbolic of a spiritual Daybreak, the creation of the “New Temple”, as Tavener states. The sheer prettiness of the sound makes it rather painless to zone out on the music and feel spiritually elevated. Or you might just decide it is just glorified Trance Music.
All the voices and instruments are excellent. Sonically the recording is a treat. In multi-channel format this SACD portrays very active ambience. At the end, with brass and percussion all around, the surround-sound is impressive. But I couldn’t help thinking that more music—and a sense of mentally active worshipfulness—actually happens in the 10 minutes of Britten’s Missa brevis than in the 150 minutes of this disc.
