ECLECTIC PLAYLIST #9 BJORK AND TAVENER

I think I'm going to stop doing these pretty soon. I'm boring myself a bit. The whole point was to discover something interesting and fun, and I actually think me ripping pieces apart like this is counterproductive to that.

Tim has sent me Prayer of the Heart by John Tavener in collaboration with the Icelandic singer, Bjork.

It's fifteen minutes long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY0X2ov0tzc&feature=youtu.be

Here's what Tavener said about it:

‘I’d heard her voice…it was quite a raw, primordial sound, and I was very attracted to this sound. I thought of the ejaculatory prayer called the “Jesus Prayer” – “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me” – and I set it in three languages: in Coptic, in English, and in Greek. I thought the way she sang it was quite wonderful, and it couldn’t possibly be sung by anybody else but her, or someone with a voice very, very similar to hers. It had nothing of a western-trained voice about it. In fact, it wasn’t trained at all, and this is why I liked it so much, because… it had a savage quality, an untamed quality.  These are qualities that I like…I liked the simplicity of her, I liked the spontaneity of her, and I liked the result that came forth in Prayer of the Heart.’

I should confess: I'm a little bit in-love with Bjork. I think she's incredible. Listen to the way she sings - it is so unique and powerful and different. Who would have thought about combining that energy with the soft ethereal strings of Tavener's arrangements? Well, Tavener did, I suppose.

And the result is an extremely slow-paced piece that packs power and passion as it stretches its momentum out over a quarter of an hour.

This combination (Bjork and Tavener) provides the same kind of tension between heaven and earth that the prayer itself does. It's all about Adam crying to God in repentance, following the Fall and there's supposed to be a great chasm between the raw earth and the unreachable skies. You can hear the raw earth in Bjork's incomparable vocal line (particularly when she gets to English), and the unreachable skies surround her in the warmth and majesty of the strings.

It's worth sticking with it until the end. It's bizarre, melancholy, evocative and quite stunning.