Tavener: Eternity's Sunrise

"Tavener's best work touches the heart like that of few composers. His music seems to bypass constructs of intellect to tap a well of unconscious emotion."

"I first experienced the music on his new Harmonia Mundi album last summer... The immediate effect on me of Eternity's Sunrise...was overwhelming: The piece wrung tears from my eyes....more than anything, my emotions were elicited by Tavener's nearly artless choice of tones and the touching fragility of the work-in-progress performance."

"Eternity's Sunrise comes with companion premieres of comparable intensity, revolving around themes of love, death, and the ineffable beyond...the aptly named Song of the Angel, a feature for Rozario and estimable Academy leader/violinist Andrew Manze; the deeply moving Funeral Canticle and poetic Petra: A Ritual Dream...and the serial-but-shimmering Sappho: Lyrical Fragments."

"Indeed even after a host of artistically and commercially successful Tavener recordings, there seems something special about Eternity's Sunrise, the allure of the disc comes from the composer's acute response to the period instruments of The Academy of Ancient Music--as well as the players' s sensitive fulfillment of his charge...the Academy seems an inspired vessel for contemporary compositions that seeks to channel age-old values." GRAMOPHONE

"I have so much enjoyed working with The Academy of Ancient Music and we have together produced what seems to me a very interesting disc. In one sense, all of this music confronts Death, Love, and Eternity: death of a beloved father in Funeral Canticle; Sappho's exquiste longings for her love in Sappho: Lyrical Fragments; and Seferis showing his long Odyssean voyage on rotten timbers to those islands ever so slightly out of reach in Petra. And, then, the mystery of Eternity: Blake's Eternity's Sunrise and the Song of the Angel. In the words of St. Isaac the Syrian: "When we reach love, we have reached God; our road is ended and we have crossed to the Island which is beyond the world."
John Tavener