Page 227 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

16 October 2019

The Sixteen/Britten Sinfonia review –

MacMillan's mysticism misses its mark

**

Barbican, London
There was impeccable singing and playing, but James MacMillan’s substantial new works
disappointed

Erica Jeal

In the Portuguese village of Fátima a century ago, three shepherd children claimed to have been
told by the Virgin Mary to expect a miracle; months later, a desperately war-weary crowd duly
witnessed the sun moving and changing colour. This is the event commemorated by James
MacMillan’s The Sun Danced, commissioned by the organisation behind the Shrine of Fátima to
mark its centenary and here receiving its first UK performance, conducted with conviction
by Harry Christophers. It was paired with MacMillan’s new Symphony No 5, Le grand Inconnu, a
substantial, ruminative meditation on the Holy Spirit that premiered at this summer’s Edinburgh
festival.

That’s a lot of Catholic mysticism, and these were less easy for the undevout to buy into than some
of MacMillan’s other recent choral works. In The Sun Danced, with texts in Portuguese, Latin and
English, Mary Bevan was the gleaming soprano soloist voicing the Virgin, often doubled by a single
instrument, which gives them an air of certainty; there is no room for doubting these visions.
MacMillan uses a stageful of musicians with brilliant sonic imagination one minute, frustratingly
prosaic literalism the next – take the evocative breathing effects that open Le grand Inconnu,
flattened out five minutes later when the noise of an actual wind machine is added to the full
orchestral mix.

The performers – the Britten Sinfonia and the extended choral forces of the Sixteen – were
impeccable, in this and the two openers: Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten,
played with throbbing intensity, and Britten’s own Hymn to St Cecilia, sung with pinpoint agility.
But the two big works, illustrating rather than interrogating their texts, felt like a step backwards
for MacMillan since his powerful 2016 Stabat Mater.

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