Page 211 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

Rheingold, rendered primal and weird by the off-key fanfaring of

valveless horns. Piano and harp scatter glistening droplets of

moisture about the central movement, and the third movement’s fire
flashes brazenly over a Holst-like cortège (MacMillan sets the same

Carolingian hymn, ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, with which Mahler

opened his Eighth Symphony). Amid all this divine play, MacMillan

reserves the right to withdraw into pure, radiant choral sonority. The

unaccompanied chorus that crowns the second movement is a

moment of reflection and culmination so poised and perfect that it’s
surely destined for a second life as a standalone motet, though it’ll

never have quite the effect that it does here.

Which is? Well, putting it crudely, the whole symphony pulls quietly

towards consonance and a vast, cumulative sense of affirmation. In

the moment, and for a while afterwards, that choked me up, and I

don’t think it was just me. Why does it feel so moving when a piece
of contemporary music actually delivers on its promise? You don’t

even need the words, or the faith, though MacMillan probably

couldn’t have achieved what he has without them. After the last

climax the orchestra darted out from under the chorus and

cartwheeled about in the sunlight, before floating a final beatific
smile upon the silence. Radio Three recorded the premiere for future

broadcast; there’s a London performance at the Barbican in October,

and you should try and hear one or the other. I could be very wrong

— it goes with the job — but right now, it feels important.

At the Komische Oper Berlin, the director Barrie Kosky has been
exploring inter-war Yiddish operetta. He took to the piano at the

Lyceum, together with two singers from the company, for Forget Me

Not: a revue compiled from songs by Abraham Ellstein, Sholom

Secunda and their contemporaries. Yearning melodies and pitch-

black humour spun on a pfennig into outright hilarity (‘Yiddle,
fiddle, schmiddle, hey!’) and klezmer laments suddenly accelerated

into a tango, a waltz, or a Hungarian csardas: a reminder, as Kosky

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