Page 183 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

From the orchestral repertoire, there's the BBC SSO's Scottish premiere of the kaleidoscopic
concerto for orchestra Woman of the Apocalypse, plus a new version of Quickening from the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the voices of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, RSNO
Junior Chorus and The King's Singers.

The brand-new piece is Symphony No 5 'Le grand inconnu'. 'There are some pieces I write,
then forget about and wait for the first performance,' says MacMillan. 'But, with this work in
particular, I put in a lot of special energy and it's been very much in my mind, mulling it over,
with the score sitting on my desk.'

MacMillan isn't sure he is the right person to answer the question of what makes this
particular piece so special. 'It's big,' he says, 'for choir and orchestra, and seems a bit of a new
departure in that it is the culmination of a number of strands.' 'Le grand inconnu', an
exploration of the Holy Spirit, has been commissioned by the Genesis Foundation, whose
chair is businessman John Studzinski.

'The new symphony has grown out of conversations with him, along with Harry Christophers,
conductor of The Sixteen, and it's very different from the Stabat Mater I wrote for them a
few years ago. This piece is exultant, mystical and joyful, while the Stabat Mater is very
much the opposite. I am very curious to see what it's like', he says.

credit: Marc Marnie

Vocal music, particularly choral music, is something about which MacMillan is passionate. 'When
I was a young composer at Edinburgh University, I didn't foresee the growth of the choir as being
such an important facet of new music,' he says. 'No one really thought of writing for choirs, with
modernism focused on the virtuosity of instruments, including the voice, if music was written for
voices. Now, we have more authentic ways of thinking about the voice and the fact that The
Sixteen have come to the fore on a diet of pre-Baroque repertoire has actually meant that they've
been a seed ground for new music.'

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