Page 199 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

which she occupied when the work was first played, and which has some lovely solo
work for her instrument.

Oddly perhaps, after this feast of orchestral music, it would be easy to argue that
MacMillan’s three-movement Symphony No 5 is not really a symphony at all.

Entitled “Le grand Inconnu”, and explicitly concerned with attempting to define the
nature of the Holy Spirit in music, it follows on from his last piece for Harry
Christophers and The Sixteen, the Stabat Mater, and the focus is on its choral content

for the 50 minute duration. If the composer describes his newest work as “a choral
symphony” then that is what it is, but many may hear a piece for choir with orchestral
accompaniment.

That chorus of 60, surely the largest The Sixteen has fielded, added 40 voices from the

Genesis Sixteen project training young singers to the 20 Christophers had directed
at the Queen’s Hall recital earlier in the week. Required simply to breathe at the

work’s opening, the singers have texts in Hebrew, Greek and Latin that voice the
elemental expression of the Holy Spirit as wind, water and fire, on the road to a lovely
closing passage from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians in the New Testament.

This is some of the most accessible music MacMillan has written and sits more
happily alongside some of the popular choral work of his peers than we have perhaps
come to expect.

Beyond any doubt, and however is comes to be seen in the vast scope of the

MacMillan canon, “Le grand Inconnu” needs to become well known, and widely
heard.

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