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Track(s) taken from CDA67475

Birthday Sleep

composer
author of text

Polyphony, Stephen Layton (conductor)
Recording details: January 2004
Temple Church, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Julian Millard
Release date: September 2004
Total duration: 6 minutes 22 seconds
 

Reviews

‘Polyphony fields 25 singers for this project and for this repertory, I think you've got about a good a choir as you could possibly get. Stephen Layton directs with clarity and sensitivity. In fact, his expert pacing is the main reason for this recording's success. This is one of Layton's best CDs yet, and that's saying something’ (BBC Radio 3 CD Review)

‘The brilliant, white, celestial light Tavener so effectively evoked earlier in the decade had a chill core. Here—if you will bear with the synaesthesiac overtones—gold seeps in, along with the deep blue traditionally associated with portraits of the Virgin’ (Gramophone)

‘Stephen Layton's heartfelt commitment to the composer's music brings forth shimmering performances from his excellent choir Polyphony. If you enjoy radiant choral writing and singing, then this is the disc for you’ (Choir & Organ)

‘There's no doubt about the quality of the performances. Tavener finds devoted interpreters in Polyphony who produce some of the most beautiful choral singing you could ever hope to hear. And all is captured in a glowing recording’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘For the Tavener devotee, among whose number I include myself, this disc is an essential survey of the composer's recent musical concerns, and contains some splendid new music’ (International Record Review)

‘Stephen Layton's superb choir, Polyphony, does wonders in bringing variety to a sequence of John Tavener's works for small chorus that might easily have seemed too slow and meditative’ (The Guardian)

‘The power of Tavener at his best is fully unlocked by Polyphony and Stephen Layton, whose sensitivity to the sacred and human in his music communicates in every work on this disc’ (Classic FM Magazine)

‘Polyphony's singing is immaculate, captured in the resonant acoustic of the Temple Church in glorious recorded sound. It's a hard man who would not be moved by this disc’ (Fanfare, USA)

‘Performed with conviction by Stephen Layton's Polyphony. His professional choir manages to convey the hypnotic serenity at the heart of Tavener's latest works, while packing a punch in their more dramatic moments, a strategy supported by Hyperion's A-grade recorded sound’ (Music Week)
Birthday Sleep, dating from 1999 and setting a text by the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins – viewed by Tavener as a meditation on the Incarnation – uses similar techniques, and also employs some unexpected harmonic shifts, so that the cadences are variously in G major, E major and B minor, and Watkins’s couplet of repeating lines at the end of each strophe is set in pure F major. The effect is as disconcerting as it is fresh.

from notes by Ivan Moody © 2004

Daté de l’an 1999, Birthday Sleep, qui met en musique un texte du poète gallois Vernon Watkins – une méditation sur l’Incarnation, aux yeux de Tavener –, use de techniques similaires, mais recourt aussi à des transitions harmoniques inattendues, en sorte que les cadences sont aussi bien en sol majeur qu’en mi majeur et en si mineur, et que le couplet de Watkins, fait de vers répétés à chaque fin de strophe, est sis dans un pur fa majeur. L’effet produit est aussi déconcertant que frais.

extrait des notes rédigées par Ivan Moody © 2004
Français: Hyperion Records Ltd

Das aus dem Jahre 1999 stammende und auf einem Text des walisischen Dichters Vernon Watkins beruhende Stück Birthday Sleep – das Tavener eine Meditation über die Menschwerdung betrachtet – bedient sich ähnlicher Techniken. Hier findet man auch unerwartete harmonische Wendungen, durch die Kadenzen abwechselnd in G-Dur, E-Dur und h-Moll schließen. Watkins’s Wiederholungen der letzten Zeile am Ende jeder Strophe stehen im reinen F-Dur. Die Wirkung ist gleichermaßen beunruhigend wie auch erfrischend.

aus dem Begleittext von Ivan Moody © 2004
Deutsch: Elke Hockings

Other albums featuring this work

Tavener: Choral Music
This album is not yet available for downloadSACDA67475Super-Audio CD
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