Scotland’s pre-eminent composer, Sir James MacMillan, turns 60 this year, a landmark celebrated by the Edinburgh international festival with a series of concerts culminating in the premiere of a major new work: his Fifth Symphony.
It is three decades since the composer burst onto the British music scene with the premiere of his searing, visceral Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the BBC Proms. In that time, his work has undergone a major stylistic evolution.
MacMillan’s faith may still be the heart and centre of everything he writes, but the angry, young firebrand has been replaced by a composer who seems equally keen to explore the more ecstatic aspects of Catholic theology alongside penitence and pain.
These contrasts of past and present were brought into focus in this birthday concert. In the first half MacMillan himself conducted his Second Symphony, written for the SCO 20 years ago: a dark, deeply disquieting work that seems to pose more questions than it answers, from the tolling bells at its opening to the fragment of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde that emerge towards its close. It’s a piece that bears little relation to MacMillan’s new Fifth Symphony, a choral work commissioned by the Genesis Foundation for Harry Christophers and The Sixteen and premiered by both choirs alongside the SCO with Christophers at the helm.
Subtitled “Le grand Inconnu”, the work is a meditation on the nature of the Holy Spirit – the “great unknown” of Catholic theology. It is cast in three sections representing breath, water and fire. The work opens on whispered breaths, the sound coalescing into chanting of the Hebrew, Greek and Latin words for breath amid mysterious rustlings in the orchestra. Later this explodes into a series of dramatic, ecstatic climaxes. It’s heady stuff brimming with ideas, the result of what MacMillan describes as a compositional process lead by “stream of consciousness”.
There are many striking sections, particularly the 20-voice motet that ends the second movement, MacMillan’s homage to Tallis’s mighty Spem in Alium. MacMillan’s writing for voices is utterly assured – a reminder that this has become his medium in recent years. It’s difficult, however, to make sense of the greater whole on first hearing. But this didn’t stop it from earning a rapturous reception at the Edinburgh premiere, or a standing ovation for its composer.
• This article was amended on 20 August 2019. The Fifth Symphony was commissioned by, not for, the Genesis Foundation, as an earlier version said.
