Sospeso presents the American premiere of John Tavener's Pilgrimage, a film and live music collaboration with legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog, on Thursday and Friday, March 14 and 15, 2002, at the Miller Theater in New York.

Born in London on 28 January 1944, John Tavener showed his musical talents at an early age and by the time he entered Highgate School he was already an extremely proficient pianist and organist. He proceeded to the Royal Academy of Music where he won several major prizes for composition. Among his teachers were Sir Lennox Berkeley and the Australian composer David Lumsdaine. In 1968 his dramatic cantata The Whale, given in the debut concert of the London Sinfonietta, took its London audience by storm. Since that time Tavener has continued to show an originality of concept and an intensely personal idiom making his a voice quite separate from those of his contemporaries.

Over the years, the contemplative side of John Tavener's nature has led him in more spiritual directions and his commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church, which he joined in 1977, is now evident in all his work.

Major works of the 1980s and early 1990s include Orthodox Vigil Service; The Akathist of Thanksgiving (which was given a standing ovation in a packed Westminster Abbey at its premiere in 1988); The Protecting Veil for solo cello and strings; two large-scale choral and orchestral works, Resurrection and We Shall See Him As He Is; and an opera, Mary of Egypt, written for the 1992 Aldeburgh Festival.

The enormous popularity of Tavener's music during recent years is sustained well beyond his 50th birthday year— 1994—marked by a major BBC Festival devoted to his music. Performances of The Protecting Veil have taken place in the USA, Canada, Greece, Sweden and Japan, and the work has recently been recorded by Yo-Yo Ma for Sony Classical (SK62821).

Recent commissions have been Let's Begin Again (1995), jointly commissioned by the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Festival d'Art Sacré Paris, Greenwich Festival, London and Perth Festival, Australia; Svyati (1995) for Steven Isserlis and the Kiev Chamber Choir at the Cricklade Festival; Innocence (1994), written to commemorate the victims of World War II, premiered in October 1995 by the Westminster Abbey Choir, and recorded by Sony Classical (SK 66613), Agraphon for soprano Patricia Rozario and string orchestra, commissioned to form the centrepiece of a Tavener Festival in Athens, November 1995; Feast of Feasts (1995), commissioned by Al Bustan Festival, Lebanon and first performed by Yurlov State Academic Choir in March 1996; Prayer To The Hold Trinity (1995) commissioned by Cambridge Taverner Choir and performed by them in April 1996, at Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge; Vlepondas (1996) commissioned by the European Cultural Centre of Delphi; The Hidden Face (1996) commissioned by the City of London Sinfonia and first performed by them, conducted by Richard Hickox, with Michael Chance, counter-tenor and Nicholas Daniel, in October 1996. Tavener was a featured composer at the Perth Festival, Australia, February/March 1997.

Combined with his reflective spirit, John Tavener has an engaging humour which is never far from the surface. This is captured by director Geoffrey Haydon in his touching documentary on Tavener Glimpses of Paradise, which was screened for the first time on BBC Television in November 1992 and subsequently at the BBC's Tavener Festival in January 1994. Geoffrey Haydon's book Glimpses of Paradise was published by Gollancz in the autumn 1995. In 1998 John Tavener was the subject on a television documentary as part of the South Bank Show series.