James MacMillan’s Ordo Virtutum (“The Order of the Virtues”), for two eight-part choirs and percussion, was written during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns for the MDR Rundfunk Choir, who gave the first performance in Leipzig last year. This was its UK premiere by the BBC Singers and National Youth Voices under Sofi Jeannin.
A work of unwavering spiritual certainty lasting just over an hour, it derives from the allegorical morality play of the same name by Hildegard of Bingen, dating from about 1150, in which personifications of the Christian virtues (Humility, Faith, Chastity, Hope, and so on) wage war with the devil for the human Soul, which is assailed by temptation yet all the while conscious of its longing to return to the God who created it.
Hildegard’s use of plainchant to illustrate her drama finds echoes in the shapes and contours of MacMillan’s own thematic material, and the way his sometimes complex polyphony suddenly coalesces into unisons or monotones from which new ideas evolve and emerge. This is music that frequently aspires to timelessness, as numinous tone clusters usher the Soul into God’s presence, and chordal chants and bass drones echo the hieratic ceremonials of eastern orthodox church music.
Percussionist Andrew Barclay’s steady drumbeats anchored the score in ritual, but elsewhere there was a startling physicality to some of MacMillan’s textures, and moments of chromatic bewilderment when the Soul is faced with temptation, which really threw us off balance.
The Soul was sung by soprano Emma Tring, her voice soaring rapturously upwards before sinking down towards a darker, lower register that seems very much of the world in which she finds herself. Rebecca Lea, as Humility and Chastity, stayed in the stratosphere, sounding exquisite. Her fellow Virtues, each sung by a chorus member, were all sharply and astutely characterised. The devil, however, who is beyond any kind of harmony, speaks rather than sings (MacMillan follows Hildegard here), and Charles Gibbs’s voice, reverberantly amplified, echoed balefully round the auditorium.
Jeannin forged the disparate elements into a seamlessly unified whole. The choral singing, meanwhile, was breathtaking and glorious.
• To be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 20 February
