• Date: 1980
• Main Performer: Sir John Tavener
• Genre: Vocal

Review

Sir Peter Pears, who had succeeded to the leadership of the annual Aldeburgh Festival on the death of his partner Peter Pears, commissioned a set of songs from John Tavener for the 1980 Festival. The eminent tenor had suggested six songs about love and death from an anthology by the Greek poet Cavafy. Tavener found he could not respond to the homosexual eroticism of these poems, and instead chose six songs written by poets of the Abbasid dynasty of Baghdad.

The settings are for tenor, alto flutes, bells, and gongs. The works are written in the serial technique, yet somehow have a Middle Eastern feeling to them. Pears performed the very difficult songs very well at their premiere at the Snape Maltings on June 18, 1980. It was while driving back to London alone the evening of the premier that Tavener suffered a stroke while driving and struck a parked car, the beginning of a difficult period of surgery and recovery. According to one of his neurosurgeons, the stroke damage to the right temporal lobe (which seems to be where the musical impulse is located) re-wired his compositional mind, so that this is the last piece written before a change of style.

~ All Music Guide