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Programme Note

This work was written for the flautist Ileana Ruhemann and is headed by a quotation from Seferis, Greece’s great second-century poet: ‘Wherever I travel Greece wounds me’. Tavener directs that it should be played ‘like a folk-song – with great stillness – but also with great freedom as if playing in the vast expanses of the wild terrain of Northern Greece’. The melodic material is redeployed in his large-scale setting of the Passion story Resurrection where it is associated with the sorrow of the Mother of God.