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
