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Biography and further information

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Sir Malcolm Arnold CBE 1921-2006 - Biography

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To substantially widen the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the music of Sir Malcolm Arnold and his music, both in Britain and abroad.

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His life and key works

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Malcolm Arnold fought against alcoholism, mental illness and the music establishment to create an eclectic body of work that embodied his unique artistic vision.

"Music is a social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is." So saying, Malcolm Arnold firmly nailed his creative colours to the mast. Whether in the pungent immediacy of his Cornish Dances, the patriotic bluster of The Bridge on the River Kwai, or the painfully introspective musing of his Guitar Concerto's slow movement, Arnold had an emotional openness and sincerity rare in composers of his generation.

Like Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he met and befriended at a conference in 1957, Arnold produced a series of symphonies whose bracing eclecticism was central to his artistic vision. He also shared with Shostakovich a profound gift for film music, an increasing obsession with human frailty and death, and a delight in juxtaposing musical opposites, often to devastating effect.

For much of his life, Arnold was deeply unpopular with the British classical music establishment, whose modernist pretensions were ill-equipped to deal with the knockabout antics of his comedy overture, Beckus The Dandipratt. Still worse, musicians actually enjoyed playing Arnold's brilliantly written, mellifluously scored music - and audiences lapped it up.

Arnold's 500-plus compositions include 132 film scores, nine symphonies, seven ballets, two operas, 20 concertos, a considerable quantity of chamber music, and various works for wind and brass instruments. Given the extent of his musical achievements, it is remarkable that he was never accorded a distinguished place alongside the mainstream British talents of Britten, Tippett and Walton (the latter with whom he collaborated and became close friends).

The neglect that he suffered at times undoubtedly contributed to a life punctuated by mental collapse, alcoholism, bouts of irascible behaviour and attempted suicides. Yet he remained a lovable and generous man at heart, one who thankfully lived long enough to enjoy the critical reappraisal and acclaim that his music received during the last decade of his life.

Arnold was born into a musical Northampton family of shoe-makers. He loathed school and ended up being privately tutored at home, but rapidly discovered the delights of music through the violin, piano and organ. Inspired by his love of jazz, and Louis Armstrong in particular, Arnold took up the trumpet and, aged 16, won a scholarship to study at London's Royal College of Music. He made his concert debut playing Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.2 on an authentic trumpet, or as he called it "a gas pipe".

By this time Arnold was already composing fluently, but it was as a trumpeter that he launched his professional career; during the second year of his training he was appointed third trumpet of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, quickly rising to principal.

In 1943, he put aside his pacifist convictions and joined the army, a move that compounded his natural aversion to authoritarianism. After taking as much as he could stand (two years), in desperation he shot himself in the foot and was discharged. For a short while he played second trumpet in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but then returned to the LPO where he stayed until 1948 when he won the Royal Academy of Music's Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled him to study composition in Italy. By then he had composed around 20 concert works including Beckus the Dandipratt, which featured Arnold himself on the premiere LPO recording.

Over the next 12 years Arnold produced a stream of well-crafted and inventive scores. In 1949, he composed the first of his nine symphonies, synthesising a Sibelian splendour with a Mahlerian delight in irony.

Four years later the Second Symphony made such an impact that it enjoyed a number of international performances. Meanwhile, his two sets of English Dances (1951) proved enormously popular, and in 1952 he composed the music to the first of three films for director David Lean: The Sound Barrier. Hobson's Choice followed in 1953 and The Bridge On The River Kwai four years later.

Arnold was by now deluged with commissions. His seemingly unending gift for melody, acute ear for instrumental sonority, and ability to work with fearsome accuracy at high speed, made him the toast of the younger generation of composers for a brief spell. He also began conducting and recording his own music with no small amount of success. The musical world, it seemed, lay at his feet. Yet behind the scenes the problems that would later escalate to almost overwhelm him were already brewing.

Developing a heightened taste for wine and women is hardly unusual among newfound celebrities. But in Arnold's case, the champagne lifestyle combined with his existing mental health problems to produce a hurtling pendulum of extreme mood swings. All of this is painfully reflected in the staggering emotional range of his music during this period.

It beggars belief that the same man who bared his creative soul in the musical melting-pot of the Fifth Symphony (1961), was behind the raspberry-blowing send-ups of The Belles Ff St. Trinian's (1954) and the anarchic A Grand, Grand Overture for organ, three vacuum cleaners, floor polisher, four rifles and orchestra (1956), written for the mad-cap genius, artist and musician Gerard Hoffnung.

Desperate to escape the outer turmoil of swinging London and the inner turmoil of his own demons, Arnold set up home in the West Country at St Merryn on the north coast of Cornwall. His struggles with alcohol and manic depression continued unabated, yet he fulfilled a series of wide-ranging commissions, including pieces for violinist Yehudi Menuhin and guitarist Julian Bream, and the Peterloo Overture for the TUC's centenary in 1968.

Most famous of all from this period are the set of four Cornish Dances (1966) and The Padstow Lifeboat (1968). In honour of the impact Arnold had on the musical life of the peninsula, he was made a Bard Of The Cornish Gorseth in 1969 - the year that Arnold conducted the premiere of the Concerto For Group And Orchestra by rock group Deep Purple's Jon Lord. A CBE followed in 1970.

In the 1970s there was a gradual downturn in Arnold's health, which a move to Ireland in 1972 did little to abate. Things came to a head in 1975 when - largely because of his unpredictable personality and leftist political views - he was passed over as Master Of The Queen's Music following the death of Arthur Bliss (the honour went instead to Malcolm Williamson).

Arnold's second marriage then ended in divorce and, not for the first time, he attempted suicide. Hardly surprisingly, his easy flow of invention slowed to a trickle. In 1978, he returned to England and the following year checked himself into a private specialist hospital in an attempt to conquer his mental illness and alcoholism.

Given his unquestionable status as one of England's greatest living composers, what happened next is particularly poignant. In 1983, he left hospital and was given a room by his social worker at the pub where she lived. However, she died the following year and Arnold was left literally out on the streets. If it hadn't been for a passer-by recognising him and informing the BBC of his plight, there's no telling what might have happened. By a fortunate chain of events, Arnold soon found himself living in Norfolk, permanently cared for and managed by Anthony Day.

Happily, Arnold began composing again and, in 1986, completed what was intended to be his farewell work - the Ninth Symphony. However, he hadn't reckoned for a spate of commissions from distinguished admirers and friends that resulted in another dozen pieces written for the likes of cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, flautist James Galway and recorder virtuoso Michaela Petri. Feeling creatively "burnt-out", he retired from composing in 1990.

Remarkably, this seemed to light the touchpaper of interest in Arnold's music in a way it hadn't enjoyed since its 1950s heyday. The Ninth Symphony received its world premiere in 1992; the following year he officially became "Sir Malcolm" and record companies began releasing CDs of his music in unprecedented quantities.

His 80th birthday in 2001 was marked by a string of concerts both in Britain and abroad, which inspired two major biographies and Tony Palmer's remarkable documentary film.

Sadly, Arnold passed away on September 23, 2006, just a few weeks short of his 85th birthday. He could have wished for no more devoted and fitting musical commemoration than the many concerts and events originally planned in celebration.
The Essential Collection
For the complete picture

Eight English Dances, Opp.31 & 33 (1950/1951)
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Charles Groves For many listeners, the quintessential Arnold is contained in his indelible sets of English, Cornish, Scottish, Irish and Welsh dances. Yet if it hadn't been for a suggestion from a publisher friend that he might like to write something along the lines of Dvorˇák's Slavonic Dances we would have been denied some of the most delectable miniatures in the British music tradition. EMI 574 7802

For symphonic mastery

Symphony No.5 (1961)
London Symphony Orchestra/Hickox The Fifth Symphony marks the period in Arnold's life when he was bursting with so many ideas in contrasting idioms that it took a symphony to fuse them together. En route, he pays musical tributes to departed friends.
Chandos CHAN 9385
For colour and spectacle
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Director David Lean, Producer Sam Spiegel
This two-disc special edition DVD of the classic film, for which Arnold received an Oscar, isolates the music so that you can appreciate his colossal achievement in producing the score in just 10 days.
Sony Entertainment CDR 10001
For dry-eyed humour
Padstow Lifeboat, Op.94 (1968)
Grimethorpe Colliery Band/Arnold Arnold composed this Cornish brass-band standard march as a tribute to the crews of the RNLI lifeboat station at Padstow, to mark the occasion of the building of a new lifeboat house and slipway.
RCA 74321 88392-2

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Malcolm Arnold fought against alcoholism, mental illness and the music establishment to create an eclectic body of work that embodied his unique artistic vision. "Music is a social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is." So saying, Malcolm Arnold firmly nailed his creative colours to the mast.

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4 Cornish Dances

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Sir Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006), England - Four Cornish Dances, Op. 91 I. Vivace II. Andantino III. Con moto e sempre senza parodia IV. Allegro ma non troppo Queensland Symphony Orchestra Andrew Penny -------------------

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15 interesting facts

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He changed the face of British opera and composed some of this century's best-loved choral works, but how much do you really know about Benjamin Britten? Marking 100 years since his birth, discover 15 fascinating facts about the great man.

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Britten: 15 facts about the great composer

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He changed the face of British opera and composed some of this century's best-loved choral works, but how much do you really know about Benjamin Britten? Marking 100 years since his birth, discover 15 fascinating facts about the great man.

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Benjamin Britten conducts War Requiem - Live Television Broadcast

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Benjamin Britten Conductor Meredith Davies Conductor Heather Harper soprano Thomas Hemsley baritone Peter Pears tenor Melos Ensemble BBC Symphony Chorus BBC Symphony Orchestra August 4, 1964

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A Ceremony of Carols

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Benjamin Britten - A Ceremony of Carols (Op. 28) - George Guest; Marisa Robles; St. John's Cambridge

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8 folk songs of the British Isles

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Benjamin Britten : Eight Folk Songs of the British Isles, arranged for voice and orchestra

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With his prolific, wide-ranging and boundary-busting output, the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who has died of leukaemia at the age of 81, made a profound contribution to music in Britain and beyond. He was an enfant terrible of the 1960s, a successor to the avant-garde generation of Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Berio and Xenakis, but at the same time a composer of a distinctly British hue who later served as Master of the Queen's Music.

He traversed the genres, from symphonies and concertos to opera, choral music and works for the theatre, ballet and film. He was also an experienced conductor, with the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras at home and the likes of the San Francisco Symphony and the Leipzig Gewandhaus abroad.

He was born in Salford in 1934, and attended what is now the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was part of the Manchester School with the likes of Harrison Birtwistle, John Ogdon and Alexander Goehr, and he later studied at Princeton with Milton Babbitt.

He had had an early start in music. When his parents took him to see Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers at the age of four, he announced that he was going to be a composer. Ten years later, he submitted a piece called Blue Ice to the BBC radio programme Children's Hour. The producer Trevor Hill showed it to the show's resident singer and entertainer Violet Carson, who later found lasting fame as Coronation Street's Ena Sharples. "He's either quite brilliant or mad," she declared.

Indeed, his early works were noisy and brutalist, featuring twisted takes on early music, or on dance tunes like the foxtrot: one performance featured a soprano dressed in a red nun's habit shrieking through a megaphone, while Eight Songs for a Mad King mixed spoken monologues gabbled by George III interspersed with fragments of Handel's Messiah. Concerts were often punctuated by shouts of "Rubbish!"

One one occasion, after much of the audience had walked out of the premiere of Worldes Blis at a Prom performance in 1969, he let it be known before the second performance that he had made extensive revisions, and he was delighted that critics thought the new version to be greatly improved. It was, of course, the original version unchanged.

Like Eight Songs for a Mad King, much of his early work was first performed by Fires of London, the ensemble he co-founded in 1965 with Birtwistle and others, originally to stage Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Other Maxwell Davies pieces thus premiered were Vesalii Icones, The Martyrdom of St Magnus, Ave Maris Stella and Revelation and Fall.

A permanent move to the Orkney Islands in 1971 heralded a shift in his musical worldview. The landscape and culture - especially the work of the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown - had a deep impact on him, and while his music could still possess jagged edges, there was a new-found serenity, though he recalled for a BBC4 documentary in 2013 being described as "a traitor" to the cause of new music because he had allowed tonality into one of his pieces.

He became interested in classical forms, completing his First Symphony in 1976; his Tenth Symphony received its premiere in 2014.He also wrote a Sinfonia Concertante (1982), as well as the series of 10 Strathclyde Concertos for various instruments, highlights of his work with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra between 1987 and 1996). Between 2002 and 2007 he work on a series of string quartets for the Maggini String Quartet to record on Naxos Records (the so-called Naxos Quartets). He viewed the cycle, he said, "as a novel in 10 chapters".

In 1977 he founded the St Magnus Festival, an annual event with Orkney residents at its heart. What may be his most-heard piece had its premiere during the 1980 Festival: "Farewell to Stromness", a piano interlude in The Yellow Cake Revue, which he composed following a report that uranium deposits had been found near the Orcadian town of Stromness. It was quite unlike his earlier work, and the Independent music critic Andy Gill described the pieces in the Revue as "simple but deeply satisfying evocations of place, weather and character."

His sense of social responsibility was threaded through many of his works, touching on issues such as war, the environment and politics. But his playful side was evident when an Independent journalist attempted to contact him at his hotel in Las Vegas in 1995 when he was touring with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. He was eventually tracked down, despite the hotel listing him as "Mavis". He went on to compose Mavis in Las Vegas, which the conductor John Mauceri described as "a totally mad transvestite dream ballet ... a bubble-bath in a heart-shaped jacuzzi".

Critics were not always kind to his post-1970 output, often deeming it unchallenging and safe, but he was unperturbed, remarking, "I have been criticised a lot for writing in different styles and different kinds of music. I've been called a prostitute. Fine. In that case, so was Mozart."

He was characteristically ahead of the curve in 1996 when he became was one of the first classical composers to open a download website, MaxOpus - though it would bring trouble when two of MaxOpus's directors were found to have embezzled £450,000 from Maxwell Davies. The site was relaunched in 2009.

He was also ahead of his time in his personal life - at least in Orcadian terms. In 2007 he and his partner Colin Parkinson planned to hold their civil partnership ceremony on Sanday, where they had lived for nine years, accompanied by a piece of music he had written for the event, but Orkney Islands Council ruled that the registrar, a friend of the couple, was not authorised to officiate - though officials also cited fears of a media circus and "unsuitable music" as reasons to move the ceremony.

"Everybody can get married where they live except me, it seems," he said. "Fundamental religious people, who delve into the Bible to justify their hatreds, still hold great sway. That kind of malignant influence is wrong."

Knighted in 1987, he was Master of the Queen's Music from 2004 to 2014 - a job, he said, that converted him from a republican into a royalist. "I have come to realise that there is a lot to be said for the monarchy," he said. "It represents continuity, tradition and stability."

But though he may have mellowed, the former enfant terrible could still make a noise. A few years ago he suggested that people whose mobile phones go off during concerts should be fined, with proceeds going to the Musicians' Union. He also described taped music in public places as "some kind of commercial and cultural terrorism," complaining that he had been driven out of a branch of Waterstone's by the music blaring over the shop's loudspeakers.

And when David Cameron appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2014 and chose mostly pop music, Maxwell Davies raged, "In any other European country, a politician who chose that sort of garbage would be laughed out of court. The anti-artistic stance of our leaders gets up my nose. Their main aim is to turn us all into unquestioning passive consumers who put money into the bosses' pockets. That is now the purpose of education."

He had a lifelong commitment to education himself, and wrote much well-received music for young people; his children's opera The Hogboon will have its world premiere at the Barbican in June with Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra. In his own appearance on Desert Island Discs he said, "I feel that I want to tell people how it is to be PMD, and I do hope my music reflects something of the spiritual values and helps people to understand their own musicality, their own spiritual development, and that it means something to people's spiritual lives.

"This is terribly important to me. I would hate not to have my pieces played. I would hate not to be able to communicate: it's a love of people, I think, as basic as that."
Peter Maxwell Davies, composer and conductor: born Salford 8 September 1934; CBE 1981, Kt 1987, CH 2014; died Hoy, Orkney Islands 14 March 2016.
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Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Composer and conductor

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With his prolific, wide-ranging and boundary-busting output, the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who has died of leukaemia at the age of 81, made a profound contribution to music in Britain and beyond.

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Listen live to Classic FM online radio. Discover classical music and find out more about the best classical composers, musicians and their works.

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BBC Radio 3 composer of the week podcast

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Britten, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), Composer of the Week - BBC Radio 3

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Donald Macleod explores the music of Benjamin Britten's formative years

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Farewell to Stromness

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Peter Maxwell Davies - Farewell to Stromness for Piano (1980) [Score-Video]

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Eight songs for a Mad King

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Peter Maxwell Davies (born 1934) - Eight Songs for a Mad King (with subtitles)

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PLEASE NOTE: This performance includes subtitles - the same performance without subtitles is available on our YouTube Channel The sound recording of this performance was supervised by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies Filmed on 31st March 2012 at the Digital Performance Lab, the University of Salford, Media City UK.

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Discovering his music

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John Tavener was one of our most treasurable creative talents. A friend of John Lennon and Ringo Starr during their mid-1960s Beatles peak, and the favourite British composer of Prince Charles, Tavener introduced a contemplative stillness and artful simplicity into a music scene ravaged by the gaudy excesses of the avant garde movement.

At a time when many composers were reaching outwards in a desperate attempt to embrace popular idioms and world music, Tavener turned inwards following his conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith in 1977, resulting in a steady flow of hauntingly beautiful vocal scores without precedent in modern times.

Like his Estonian colleague Arvo Pärt, Tavener opened up a new creative world in which the smallest gesture was of the greatest significance. Listening to a score by Tavener re-engages and sharpens our aural sensitivities. As each meticulously balanced melodic line gently unfolds one has a strange sense of the infinite opening up before one, almost as though time has become momentarily suspended.

Yet behind such deceptively simple musical foregrounds lies a musical imagination of supreme ingenuity; witness The Lamb, a heavenly choral miniature that is miraculously derived from just seven different notes. For Tavener, life, art and spiritual belief are about the tantalising dichotomy that experience and knowledge should lead ultimately to a divine state of innocence.

Unlike many great composers, Tavener's spiritual and musical destiny was mapped out for him from the very start. His parents were devout Presbyterians with a strong interest in music, and by the time he won a scholarship to Highgate School in north London, he was already an accomplished pianist and organist.

The great English piano virtuoso Solomon was so captivated by Tavener's playing that he encouraged his young protégé to consider a career as a touring performer. However, Tavener had already caught the composing bug via a pair of sacred pieces he had written in the early 1960s - Credo and Genesis, a short oratorio. When in 1962 he began studies at the Royal Academy Of Music in London there was simply no stopping him. In any case the situation was decided when he began to suffer neurasthenic pains in his back and legs, which effectively ruled out a virtuoso career.

Tavener's creative thinking now went into overdrive thanks to lessons with Lennox Berkeley, increasing exposure to the music of Boulez, Ligeti and Messiaen, and the presence of such distinguished fellow students as Richard Rodney Bennett, David Bedford, William Mathias and Nicholas Maw. Tavener emerged as a fully paid-up avant-gardist with his Piano Concerto, a one-act opera entitled The Cappemakers and the cantata Cain and Abel.

Yet the work that launched him to stardom was his 1968 dramatic cantata The Whale, premiered by the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton as part of the ensemble's debut concert. The work's dizzying melange of amplified percussion, pre-recorded tape and a chorus using loudhailers so captured the bracing, "flower-power" spirit of the time that John Lennon took the unprecedented step of inviting Tavener to record the work on The Beatles' newly created Apple label. Following impressive sales, the follow-up was the all-embracing Celtic Requiem, which includes parts for Aeolian bagpipes, electric and bass guitars.

Until now, everything had seemed easy for the young genius. He composed In Alium for the 1968 Proms in just three weeks - it created such a sensation at its premiere that the promenaders insisted it was encored in the second half of the concert - and the following year the 25-year-old composer was appointed Professor of Composition at Trinity College of Music in London.

Then Benjamin Britten unintentionally put the cat among the pigeons by inviting Tavener to compose a full-length opera for the Royal Opera House. To receive such an accolade from arguably the world's leading master of the genre seems to have sparked in Tavener a crisis of artistic identity.

Initially Tavener decided on Notre Dame as a subject, but after much painful effort he decided to withdraw it and set to work instead on Thérèse (1973-76). This proved no less problematic during the preparatory stages, but in the event audiences lapped it up - even if the critics were rather less fulsome in their praise.

By now Tavener was, by his own admission, "drinking far too much whisky" in the wake of the break-up of his first marriage to the 20-year-old ballerina Victoria Maragopoulou, which lasted only eight months. He was on the brink of a breakdown when in 1977 he was received into the Russian Orthodox Church, a crucial event that he has since described as "a homecoming". Gradually he began to find his old composing facility returning and with it a new uncluttered simplicity of style that has since defined his creative outlook.

Spiritually and musically speaking, Tavener had turned the corner. Yet it was also around this time that he was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder of the heart that typically affects people with disproportionately long limbs (Tavener is six feet six inches tall), and which led to a gradual deterioration of his health during the 1980s.

However, creatively, Tavener's rediscovery of the essential purity and innocence of his gift was bearing fruit in a series of sacred choral miniatures that redefined his status as a composer. Most celebrated of these intoxicating spiritual masterpieces is The Lamb (1982) for unaccompanied chorus, yet scarcely less memorable is Ikon Of Light (1983) for chorus and string trio, Orthodox Vigil Service (1984) for priests, chorus and handbells, and the Akathist Of Thanksgiving (1987), which many consider his finest masterpiece.

In 1989, Tavener notched up two major successes with his mesmerising choral work Resurrection and the Steven Isserlis-led Proms premiere of his Protecting Veil (written in 1987) for cello and orchestra, which went on to become an international best-selling album.

Just when it looked as though Tavener had conquered the worst his demons could throw at him, in 1990 he had to be resuscitated on the operating table when his heart stopped beating during an operation to remove a tumour from his jaw. This death-defying experience had a profound effect upon Tavener's outlook on life.

"Before my illness I'd always had a morbid fear of death," he reflected, "but since the operation, death has become one's spouse. It's not terrifying any more. The possibility of eternal life is always there, but no one can tell you. The Roman Church will tell you if you do this you'll go there, if you do that you'll go someplace else. It feels as if you're arriving at Heathrow Airport. But we don't know the judgment of God - no one knows."

The year 1991 was to prove axiomatic for Tavener. Determined to make the most of any time remaining, he married Maryanna, a remarkable woman 21 years younger than himself. Initially worried about the impact married life and becoming a father might have on his composing - he has two daughters, Theodora and Sofia - in the event it proved a vital tonic.

"Fatherhood hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be," he confessed, "and it's made no difference to my writing. It might just have made me marginally less selfish."

By now he had also developed a close friendship with Mother Thekla, a former Cambridge graduate and intelligence officer during the war, who had co-founded the Monastery of the Assumption in Whitby, Yorkshire. She remained his spiritual mentor until 2003 when Tavener's increasing interest in eastern religions led to a rift between the two.

During the past 10 years, Tavener has become established as Britain's most popular living composer, not least after his Song For Athene (1993) was memorably performed during the closing stages of Princess Diana's funeral on September 6, 1997. A New Beginning played out the last few minutes of the 20th century at the Millennium Dome in 1999, and the following year Tavener was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen.

His exploration of Hinduism, Islam and the philosophical teachings of the German philosopher and metaphysician Frithjof Schuon led in recent years to such hypnotic musical incantations as Lalishri (2006), written specially for violinist Nicola Benedetti.

"The one thing that exists is God: everything else is an illusion," declared Tavener in 2004, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. "If you love someone, you don't really love that person, you love God. I can't see it any other way. There's only one being, one thing. There's only one God and only one thing that exists, and that is God. We are God, and we have to find that in ourselves. It's you and I, there is no other. It's all one."

The Essential Collection

For The Complete Picture

The Protecting Veil (1987)
Steven Isserlis (vlc), London Symphony Orchestra/Rozhdestvensky
"I wished to make a lyrical icon in sound, using the music of the cello rather than the brush," said Tavener. "I have tried to capture some of the almost cosmic power of the Mother of God. She is represented by the cello and never stops singing; the accompanying string music is an extension of her unending song."
Virgin Classics 363 2932

For Spiritual Balm

Song For Athene (1993)
Westminster Abbey Choir/Martin Neary
The magical, long-breathed stillness of eastern orthodoxy profoundly influenced the Song For Athene, which incorporates Shakespeare into the Orthodox funeral service. This moving and now much-loved work was memorably performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, on September 6, 1997.
Sony SK 66613

For Late Period Mastery

Lalishri (2006)
Nicola Benedetti (violin), London Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Litton
Lalishri was inspired by the 14th-century Hindu Saint and poet Lalla Yogishwari, whose expressive intensity and innocence Tavener found exactly paralleled in the artistry of Nicola Benedetti. The five sections move from ritual dance to a musical expression of bliss.
DG 476 6198

For Choral Bliss

Lament For Jerusalem (2002)
Angharad Gruffydd Jones (sop), Peter Crawford (ct), Choir of London, Choir of London Orchestra/Jeremy Summerly
Sung in Greek and English, the Lament For Jerusalem is a mystical love song that unites Christian, Judaic and Islamic texts in a moving realisation of Christ's sorrow at Jerusalem's rejection of every messenger that God had sent it.
Naxos 8.557826

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John Tavener was one of our most treasurable creative talents. A friend of John Lennon and Ringo Starr during their mid-1960s Beatles peak, and the favourite British composer of Prince Charles, Tavener introduced a contemplative stillness and artful simplicity into a music scene ravaged by the gaudy excesses of the avant garde movement.

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The Lamb

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Composed by John Tavener in 1982, and sung by King's College Choir, Cambridge, this solemn Christmas Carol is accompanied with photographs of winter scenes taken by other people. There are undertones of beauty in both the music, the pictures and the message, which all suit each other well.

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BBC Radio 3 - Music Matters, Sir John Tavener

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Tom Service pays tribute to composer Sir John Tavener with a recently-held interview.

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Following the outpouring of The Veil of the Temple, Tavener found the need to look further afield for inspiration. While remaining firmly Orthodox, he broadened his field of vision. This need for new material came at the same time as the shocking bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York.