Page 161 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

questions about God. Woman of the Apocalypse was inspired by the art of
Blake, Dürer, Rubens, and others.

Edinburgh this month will include his Missa Brevis; his powerful, insistent
work Quickening (exploring birth and new life, and including a children’s

choir, on Saturday 10th); and a wry, tongue-in-cheek organ concerto, A
Scotch Bestiary, “in which characters from Scottish life feature: bees,
ducks, hyenas, big fish, jackals”. His cantata commemorating the First
World War also features on the 16th at the Greyfriars Kirk.

The undoubted highlight will be the première of MacMillan’s Fifth
Symphony. “After my Fourth Symphony, I always wondered if there
might be another, and indeed a fifth has now come along.

“The symphony was commissioned by the Genesis Foundation, whose
founder, the philanthropist John Studzinski, gave me a copy of the
theologically stimulating The Holy Spirit, Fire of Divine Love by the
Belgian-Swedish Carmelite Fr Wilfrid Stinissen (1927-2013). It steered
me to the visionary poetry of St John of the Cross. Studzinski (who also
commissioned MacMillan’s Stabat Mater) has been a fabulous — and

generous — enabler and supporter of the arts, especially of The Sixteen, in
whose work he finds resonances that accord with his own, and who play a
vital role in the symphony.”

Macmillan talks animatedly of the “mysteriousness” of the Holy Spirit: “I
was very conscious in the symphony that while Christ and God the Father
feature regularly in religious music, the Holy Spirit does less so. Seeking a
structure, I became aware of specific words: firstly, the Greek pneuma and

Latin spiritus: both mean ‘breath’. The term that inspired me especially
was the parallel Jewish word, Ruah. I allotted that name to the first
movement; to the second, Zao, Greek for ‘I am alive, I flourish’; and to the
third, ignis — “fire”. I then had to find what texts, scriptural and
otherwise, would best convey the content, and shape the structure, of the
music.”

The mystery is underlined by the title: Le grand inconnu (“The Great

Unknown”). In the music, MacMillan seeks, in part, to generate “spectral
sounds”. He says: “One thing I am striving to achieve is an intense
expressivity. I wanted to explore the elemental and primal sounds, and
words, associated with the Spirit.”
The sheer power and intensity of the work, and its weighty scoring, can
perhaps be best felt “when the large chorus and the chamber ensemble

divide into as many as 20 parts”.

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