Reviewed by John Irvine

"Akhmatova Requiem" was written during 1979 and 1980 and is a selling of Requiem, a cycle of poems by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova as testimony to the rigours of Stalin's regime. Tavener wrote that "her cry of anguish inspired me lo compose the complete selling...to which I have added some prayers from the Russian Orthodox Church." First performed in Edinburgh in 1981, this live recording is of the second performance at the BBC London Proms. As with all live recordings there are Maws in the quality of the finished product, the most intrusive of which is audience noise. Next lime you go to a classical concert, please take cough sweets! While a live performance allows for interaction between performers and audience. often resulting in a level of artistic and emotive performance unachievable in the studio, a studio recording would allow a blemish-free benchmark recording to be made for this exceptional piece of music. Tavener's work is uniform, austere and self denying. Not lingering over detail and avoiding any sense of operatic melodrama, he has sought instead to express the poems' spiritual heart, conveying the endless winter of their hopelessness in measured purposeful music of immense cumulative power. It doesn't make easy listening. the weight of interpretation resting on a soprano part that is enormously demanding both physically and emotionally, and is very different from the works which have made him internationally famous during the late '80s and early "90s. In many ways "Akhmatova Requiem" is an unjustifiably neglected work - it has greater sustaining power than many of Tavener's recent compositions and his effect on audiences cannot be denied: I attended a concert performance of this in 1994 and can testify that the audience were complete overwhelmed by the emotional content and dramatic power of this piece. A definite "must hear".