Page 225 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

religious composer Arvo Pärt. No corner of musical history remained unpillaged. At one point,
where the horns joined in the swirling evocation of the Spirit, I thought Wagner’s Rhine Maidens

were about to swim out from behind the kettle-drums.

The basic problem with MacMillan’s new piece is that it is so monumentally tactless. He’s bought
into the idea anything can be put with anything.

That’s fine, in a context of playful postmodern irony. In the context of a piece about the Holy Spirit
it felt appalling, and also self-defeating. Amid all that din and stylistic promiscuity, how could the
“still small voice” of the spirit possibly be heard?

MacMillan’s other premiere, a cantata to celebrate the centenary of the Apparitions at the Shrine
of Fatima entitled The Sun Danced, was similarly frustrating, in the way potentially fruitful ideas
were marred by overstatement – even though soprano Mary Bevan sang the soaring solo lines so
rapturously I was almost won over. But it was no accident that the best parts of the evening were
also the most modest. In Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia and Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam
Benjamin Britten, one felt that perfect marriage of ends and means that was so conspicuously
lacking elsewhere. IH

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