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Episode details

Radio 4,08 Feb 2014,58 mins

John Tavener

Archive on 4

Available for over a year

Sir John Tavener became a popular composer of classical music. Sir Nicholas Kenyon explores how he achieved this, through archive and through conversation with Lady Tavener, in her first interview since her husband's death, and with Tavener's friends. These include the cellist Steven Isserlis, the oboist Nicholas Daniels, and Martin Neary, Organist and Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey at the time of Princess Diana's funeral, when Tavener's Ode to Athene accompanied her coffin from the Abbey and brought his music to a wider public. Producer Marya Burgess.

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