Page 231 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

Mr. MacMillan with his score for the “Stabat Mater.”Credit...Liam Henderson for The New
York Times

Mr. MacMillan is one of Scotland’s most prominent living composers. He is also its
most outspokenly Catholic. As Philip A. Cooke wrote recently in an incisive study of
his music, “not since Olivier Messiaen has a composer given so much of his creative
life to faith.”

Even in Mr. MacMillan’s early successes, which engaged his country’s musical
heritage, he explored sacred themes. His 1990 symphonic poem “The Confession of
Isobel Gowdie,” about the 17th-century torture and burning of an accused Scottish
witch, ends with a serene string harmonization of a plainchant drawn from the
Catholic Requiem Mass. His popular percussion concerto, “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel,”
composed two years later, incorporates other Catholic plainsongs.

Mr. MacMillan has since become a prolific choral composer. He was first
commissioned by The Sixteen in 2002, for a setting of “O bone Jesu”; this led to a
productive artistic relationship. In 2009, Mr. MacMillan created a lush, expansive
“Miserere” (which will open the Lincoln Center program) for them; they later helped
to launch the Cumnock Tryst music festival in his hometown. This year, The Sixteen
performed in the premiere of Mr. MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony.

The idea for a new “Stabat Mater," however, came from the philanthropist John
Studzinski, whose Genesis Foundation has championed both Mr. MacMillan and The
Sixteen. The poem has a robust musical history — settings include 16th-century
liturgical a cappella ones by Palestrina and Lassus, and large-scale Romantic concert
works by Dvorak, Liszt and Verdi — but it was relatively overlooked by composers in
the 20th century.

After commissioning a series of shorter “Stabat Mater” pieces in 2014 from Alissa
Firsova, Tonu Korvits and Matthew Martin (playfully called the “mini-martyrs” by
Mr. Studzinski and Mr. Christophers), the Genesis Foundation ordered a full-scale
work from Mr. MacMillan. The Sixteen and the Britten Sinfonia premiered his
“Stabat Mater” in 2016 in London; two years later, they performed it in the Vatican’s
Sistine Chapel, which is rarely used for concerts.

For Mr. MacMillan, the “Stabat Mater” holds personal relevance: Shortly after he
completed it in 2015, his 6-year-old granddaughter, Sara, died. But he also finds in it
a broader resonance. The death of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee who
drowned that same year while crossing the Mediterranean Sea, Mr. MacMillan said,
“gave me a wider context to consider the ‘Stabat Mater’ as really quite a modern
statement.”

And, Mr. Christophers said, “you can be of any faith or no faith to get inside this
poem and really realize that actually what James is writing is something very much
for the 21st century.”

Although Mr. MacMillan’s faith gives his work a Catholic hue, he sees himself as part
of a widespread search among composers for the sacred in contemporary music.
Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina and Osvaldo Golijov are just some of the

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