Page 202 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

19 August 2019

Scottish Chamber Orchestra; BBCSSO/Carneiro review —
composer makes music out of breathing

Usher Hall, Edinburgh Festival
Geoff Brown

James MacMillan is a truly powerful, communicative composerTIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES
GLOSSOP★★★★☆
In the beginning was the word, says St John’s Gospel. But in the case of James MacMillan’s new choral
Symphony No 5, “Le grand Inconnu”, it was the breath. Eighteen breaths, to be precise, first heard
unadorned, then lightly layered with instrumental harmonics. Finally pitched singing arrived, sparking off a
spacious 50-minute exploration of the Holy Spirit that looked likely to join MacMillan epics such as St John
Passion and Stabat Mater in gripping the ears, spearing the heart and moving the soul.

If the grip weakened during Saturday’s premiere, and I felt it did, no one should blame the Scottish Chamber
Orchestra, the voices of the Sixteen and Genesis Sixteen, or the conductor Harry Christophers. Beautiful
sounds and precision abounded, whatever the words sliced from St John of the Cross and the Bible,
whatever the textures in the three movements dedicated to wind, water and fire, from delicate instrumental
traceries and plangent solos to 20-part polyphony and fat blasts of brass.

Nor should we blame MacMillan himself, especially after the magnificent first movement, resplendent with choral blazes,
anchored to harmonic shifts that generated immense tension. I only wish that he’d dipped his brush elsewhere into a little
more glue, binding sections that never seemed joined to their neighbours. Still, nothing rightly stopped the audience from
giving the work a standing ovation. The world needs more composers like MacMillan: powerful, communicative composers
who never hide where they come from, what they believe in, or what they feel.

Three other of his orchestral works, straddled across two Saturday concerts, prefaced this premiere. MacMillan himself
conducted the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the tangled lines of his Symphony No 2. Hearing its mercurial and darting
gestures, glinting with high woodwinds and shivering harp, punctured by an ominous snare drum, you’d never guess that
the piece’s origins lay in a piano sonata. MacMillan is a master orchestrator: something equally clear from the BBC Scottish
Symphony Orchestra’s early evening concert with Joana Carneiro, a dynamic conductor from Portugal, torso constantly
swinging left and right in step with the music’s flow.

She had much to keep track of in Woman of the Apocalypse, a tone poem even Strauss might enjoy for its vivid musical
commentary on the venerated figure featured in the Book of Revelation. Carneiro had even more on her plate in
MacMillan’s madcap organ concerto A Scotch Bestiary (Stephen Farr, soloist) – a work let down by being essentially a
private joke from a composer who usually thinks broad and wide. Why, he even makes music out of breathing.

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