On track: Tavener across the years

By WILLIAM DART

Composer John Tavener is a major voice in British music. The Protecting Veil became staple cello repertoire after its 1989 Proms premiere; his other work ranges from an eight-hour All Night Vigil to a shorter choral offering at Princess Diana's funeral.

Naxos has celebrated his 60th birthday generously with this double-disc Portrait although such samplers bring inevitable frustrations. Shortish extracts can't catch the cumulative power of complete scores even if, track by track, the single-mindedness of his vision shines through.

There are a few ear-openers (such as the wild whooping of Mandelion, played by organist Kevin Bowyer) and great pleasures to be had comparing sopranos, choirs and string quartets along the way.

With singers, it is a close call between the ethereal Heidi Grant Murphy in To a Child Dancing in the Wind and the earthier Patricia Rozario in one of Tavener's Akhmatova settings.

Among the string players, the Brodsky Quartet has the advantage of accompanying Icelandic singer Bjork in a new work, Prayer of the Heart. These 15 mesmerising minutes, delivered against the relentless thump of heartbeats, finally immerse us in the world of John Tavener.

Prayer offers the perfect musical symbiosis, from unlikely partners. The composer has praised Bjork's voice as "raw and primordial ... with a savage, untamed quality". And, for her part, the singer felt like a gun in his hand - "he had to work out my range, what I could do and then just threw this song through me".

Top marks to David McCleery's 32-page introduction, woven around the musical extracts on the CDs, even if there's no sampling from The Whale (1968), a zany relic of Tavener's avant-garde youth, famously recorded on the Beatles' Apple label.

Tavener discusses The Whale during his 45 minutes of spoken commentary, along with such trivialities as macrobiotic munchies with John and Yoko. Don't despair though. Despite irritating musical punctuations that have his piano work Zodiacs dinging like door chimes, most of the discussion is on a higher plane.

We learn that Simplicity stands above everything else in Tavener's canon - the ultimate challenge for a composer is "to write something that could be understood by fifth century man if he were dug up now". And there's also some advice that we listeners could heed, that of remaining "totally transparent, totally vulnerable and totally open". With this sort of attitude, we'd be getting a lot more out of a lot more music.

* John Tavener: A Portrait (Naxos 8.558152-53)