Tavener on the radio

Photo from www.bbc.co.uk

Today I happened to hear the John Tavener piece As One Who Has Slept on KUHF. This piece is one of my favorite of Tavener's works. It is a very short piece lasting less than ten minutes. It sets the following text taken from the Communion Hymn from the Liturgy of Saint Basil on Great and Holy Saturday:

As one who has slept

the Lord has risen,

and rising he has saved us.

Alleluia.

The musical setting is fairly simple but very solemn. Tavener employs an ison in the basses at different points in the piece. The real power of the piece though comes from his extended melismatic settings of the word "Alleluia". This is a recurring technique in many of Tavener's works.

I hope that one day someone will compile an "Alleluiaria" of all of Tavener's settings of that particular word.

A sample of this piece can be found here. A good recording of this piece can be found here.