Abundant compassion governs the ethos of Prayer for the healing of the sick, a tender setting of words from the Orthodox service of Holy Unction, one of the sacraments of the Orthodox Church. The piece, in common with Song for Athene, sets a text by Mother Thekla, Abbess of the Orthodox Monastery of the Dormition at Whitby and a key figure in Tavener’s development at the time, his ‘spiritual mother’. “Very quickly she saw the problems I was having writing music for which I had no contemporary model,” he recalled of their first meetings in 1986. “She saw that I could not go on doing what I had done so far.” Prayer for the healing of the sick, composed in 1998, conveys the nature of ascetic devotion, stripped of earthly desire and imbued with kindness.

from notes by Andrew Stewart © 2016