Revelations on a D string

Mark Pappenheim on the Greek performance of John Tavener's obsessive, surreal and shimmering Apocalypse

In the past month alone, the Megaron, Athens's splendid new state- of-the-art concert hall, has hosted performances by the Raphael Ensemble, the Philharmonia and the Mike Westbrook Band, as well as lectures by Sir Claus Moser and PD James, all as part of the city's "Britain in Greece" festival. So its decision to promote last week's three-part tribute to John Tavener under the aegis of its well-established "Greek Music Series" seems - like last year's award of the Apollo Prize for services to Hellenic culture - only to confirm the composer's own self-image as a traditional Byzantine trapped in the body of a contemporary north Londoner.

As Nikos Tsouchlos, the Megaron's director of artistic programming, says: "Being Greek is not just a question of the birth certificate." Nor is it, he feels, merely a matter of Tavener's habitual use of Orthodox tones, important as that is. "His music is an event; it has its own order of time. A Greek coming fresh to classical music will feel more at home with Tavener than with Beethoven, for example."

Or perhaps not. If any piece of music has "its own order of time", it must be The Apocalypse, Tavener's two-and-three-quarter-hour marathon run of variations on a single note (D) and a single theme (Death). At its 1994 Proms premiere, it sold out the Albert Hall; last week, as the centrepiece of the Athens series, it barely filled a third of the 2,000- seat Hall of the Friends of Music, and a fair number of those left before the end. (The interval was partly to blame; though sanctioned in the score and here inserted to allow for a fresh relay of quartettists - the original team strained their bowing arms by sustaining that drone D throughout the premiere - it fatally detracted from the work's cumulative force.)

Yet hearing Apocalypse again, in its first complete performance since the Proms, and with largely the same experienced executants - the City of London Sinfonia and Chorus, Patricia Rozario (Woman Crowned with the Sun), Ruby Philogene (Whore of Babylon), Christopher Robson (Angel) - under the careful eye of Westminster Abbey's Martin Neary, only confirmed its strengths: the obsessive, unwavering pace, the Byzantine glow of its primary colours (trilling trumpets, thundering trombones, clanging gongs), the surreal wildness of its cataclysms (a host of locusts buzzing on the strings, a ring of seven pealing countertenors), the rapt otherness of its close. I missed the spatial dimensions afforded by the Albert Hall and, even though I never thought I'd say it, its ringing acoustics (climaxes here died on the instant), but I'd not felt before the aching nostalgia for the fallen Babylon so sensuously summoned up. And if Apocalypse is an endurance test, Martyn Hill's evangelist certainly earned his wings: having started out decidedly dry and strained, his voice grew in fervour and fluidity as the revelation drew to its inevitable end-to-end-all-ends.

Importing the event is rumoured to have cost around pounds 250,000: if so, seldom can so much have been spent for so few to watch so many come so far to stand for so long to sing a single note. But then, as Nikos Tsouchlos reflected: "Yes, it will make a deficit, but we'd rather see it as an investment." And, if the presence of the film director Konchalovsky leads to the proposed big-screen version, it's one that may well pay off.

An investment with perhaps more immediate dividends, though, is Agraphon, a new work specially composed by Tavener for the Megaron series, and premiered three days earlier in the smaller (and, on this occasion, comfortably filled) 500-seat Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall. A virtuoso piece for soprano solo (the indefatigable Rozario again), two timpanists and strings (the Megaron's superb resident chamber orchestra, La Camerata, under Alexander Myrat), Agraphon's apocryphal tale of Christ, the city dump and a dead dog's carcass, as retold in a wartime poem by Sikelianos (set - somewhat oddly, given its Athenian provenance - in an English paraphrase by the late Philip Sherrard), elicits from Tavener perhaps his most Indian manner yet.

Intoning the words of Christ - who, unlike his disciples, can see beyond the stench of decay to the metaphysical truth glinting off the dead dog's teeth - Rozario delivered her microtonally wayward, expansively melismatic lines like one possessed or in the throes of prophesy, choking back her moral disgust as if behind clenched teeth before soaring up a two-octave slide to top C for her final cry of "Justice". In the pause that followed some wiseacre shouted "bravo", only to be cut short by the three thundering timpani crashes with which the work in fact ends. If nothing else, it proves that Tavener can still surprise.