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NEW PODCAST OF JOHN TAVENER’S LAMENT FOR JERUSALEM
NOW AVAILABLE ON NAXOS.COM
Critically-Acclaimed Naxos Recording of Work Released March 21st
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John TAVENER (b. 1945): Lament for Jerusalem
Choir and Orchestra of London, Jeremy Summerly
Angharad Gruffydd Jones (soprano), Peter Crawford
(counter-tenor)
Release date: March 21st, 2006
8.557826
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Naxos has posted a podcast
about John Tavener’s Lament for Jerusalem on Naxos.com.
The 20-minute documentary, produced and hosted by Naxos’ Raymond Bisha,
is part of an ongoing series of podcasts entitled Naxos Classical Music Spotlight,
and is also available on iTunes.
The Naxos recording of Lament for Jerusalem has received
substantial critical acclaim and was described in a four-star review by David
Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 26th as “musical
substantive” and “invitingly sumptuous.” John Simon
of the Buffalo News wrote that Tavener’s work was “as beautiful
as anything he’s done . . . Music, we know, can’t heal the world.
But if it could, this disc just might.”
Tavener originally composed Lament for Jerusalem in 2002, later arranging
it for the Choir of London, who premiered this new “Jerusalem version”
in London on December 18th, 2004 and performed it on their debut
tour of the “Holy City”
and the West Bank.
Sung in Greek and English, Lament for Jerusalem brings together
Christian, Judaic and Islamic texts. Of the work, Tavener has commented:
“Jerusalem is a universal symbol which signifies the changeless and celestial
synthesis of the Cosmos, and the primordial longing of man for God. Lament
for Jerusalem . . . is a love-song, lamenting our banishment from
home, and the temporary loss of our Beatific vision.”
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