Page 210 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

All symphonies were sacred symphonies, once. Haydn began each

day’s composition with a prayer, and ended every score with the

words ‘Laus Deo’. ‘These thoughts cheered me up,’ he told his
biographer Albert Dies. Haydn, like Mozart, was a lifelong Catholic,

and the Swiss theologian Hans Küng has suggested that the daring,

exuberance and glorious wholeness that characterises even Mozart’s

secular music comes from a specifically Catholic understanding of

the universe: of salvation perceived not as an object of struggle, but

as an unshakable, all-embracing certainty.

Sir James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony concerns itself with the

Holy Spirit, but he struggled to find an English phrase that did the

job, so its title is Le grand inconnu. A useful hint of vagueness there

— offering scope to change the subject in the face of those who

can’t or won’t understand. But it’s always healthy to tweak the

whiskers of prim progressives, and MacMillan’s programme note for
this world première paid the most backhanded compliment

imaginable to Darmstadt and the spectralists before falling largely

silent on the supremely assured Great Unknown of the music itself.

And sure enough, I can tell you roughly what MacMillan’s Fifth

does. What it says is something with which I’m still grappling, three
days after witnessing a sizeable Usher Hall audience rise, cheering,

to its feet. It’s a choral symphony, and in this performance with the

Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Harry Christophers, the Sixteen

served as a semi-chorus, with four singers stepping briefly out as

soloists. Using sacred texts in English, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the
three movements address the notion of the Spirit as air (or breath), as

water, and as fire.

From that starting point, MacMillan rummages energetically through

the whole toybox of musical colour and memory. Like Tippett’s

Fourth, the symphony opens with the sound of human breath; and
the first climax resembles a speeded-up opening of Wagner’s

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