The centrepiece of this new Hyperion disc devoted to works by John Tavener is Diodia, the third and latest of his string quartets. Tavener appears to have reserved the string quartet medium almost exclusively as a vessel into which to pour the distillations of some of his largest and most important compositions. Just as Tavener’s first quartet, The Hidden Treasure (1989), drew material from the large-scale choral piece The Resurrection, and the second, The Last Sleep of the Virgin (1991), from the choral work The Apocalypse, so similarly Diodia (1995) grew out of material drawn from The Toll Houses, a large-scale work scheduled to receive its premiere later this year in Carnegie Hall.
Based on a book by a Californian orthodox monk, The Toll Houses deals with the concept that symbolises ‘the posthumous states of being of the soul, where it is decided whether the soul spends a certain amount of time in hell and a certain time in heaven [sic]’. Tavener describes Diodia as ‘liquid metaphysics’, and I would say that was an excellent description of this wonderfully meditative and haunting music. As with all of Tavener’s work, it eschews traditional form and instead unfolds as a series of musical episodes that alternate with each other in almost mantric fashion. The overall atmosphere is contemplative, with passages of luminous beauty, but these are interrupted at various points by more energetic, worldly episodes. A particularly haunting passage featuring a repeated rhythmic figure played on bandir (drum) makes several appearances throughout and also brings this extraordinary work to a close. The Vanbrugh Quartet’s intense and committed performance is of the highest calibre.
The remaining items on the disc all feature music for soprano and string quartet, beautifully performed in these recordings by Patricia Rozario, for whom Tavener has composed many pieces. The World is a movingly intense setting of an equally astonishing and moving poem by Kathleen Raine, and its inclusion, together with the austerely beautiful Akhmatova Songs, originally composed for soprano and cello but heard here in an arrangement for soprano and string quartet, make a welcome addition to the catalogue. An indispensable and thoroughly recommendable disc.'