Macmillan

Westminster Cathedral Choir returns to acclaimed Scottish composer James MacMillan, whose powerful, passionate and luminous music has made him one of the best-loved choral composers of today. Included on this recording is a dramatic setting of the Tenebrae Responsories, a spiritually engaging and emotionally involving work which relates back in its searing intensity and some of its choral effects to Seven Last Words from the Cross (1993) (recorded on Hyperion CDA67460), one of MacMillan’s seminal earlier works.

As James MacMillan celebrates his 50th birthday he here conducts his large-scale, complex work, The Quickening coupled with the symphonic suite The Sacrifice: Three Interludes, taken from his opera, The Sacrifice, a work based on a medieval Welsh tale and focusing on issues of love and conflict. Co-commissioned by the BBC Proms and the Philadelphia Orchestra, The Quickening sets poetry by MacMillan’s frequent collaborator Michael Symmons Roberts. Hailed as some of the most distinguished writing since that of Benjamin Britten, the powerfully imaginative score explores the themes of birth, new life and new impulses, but as MacMillan says, it also has its dark side out of which hope is glimpsed. Joining the BBC Philharmonic is the Hilliard Ensemble, who premiered the work at the BBC Proms, accompanied by the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Youth Chorus.

When Sir Colin Davis was asked to select a composer to write a new work for his 80th birthday he chose James MacMillan, about to celebrate his own 50th birthday. MacMillan had previously considered writing a passion and used the opportunity of the commission to produce a setting based on the Gospel of St John.The result is a highly dramatic passion, fusing MacMillan's own Catholic faith, compositional style and musical influences with the long tradition of settings for the passion of Christ in both the Catholic and Lutheran faiths. In addition to the choir and orchestra, MacMillan uses a small choir of professional singers to provide the narration and a solitary baritone soloist to portray Christus.The work received its première on 27th April 2008 at the Barbican, in London, and follows the LSOLive release of two of James MacMillan's earlier works: The World's Ransoming and The Confession of Isobel Gowdie in January 2008.

Listeners familiar with Scottish composer James MacMillan through such acclaimed works as The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (1990) or the Seven Last Words from the Cross (1993) may suspect that his music is usually somber and more than a little dour; indeed, his religious and politically themed pieces are quite earnest, and have given some the feeling that it might do MacMillan good to lighten up.

James MacMillan has produced a spate of works in various genres – symphonic, concerto, opera, theater, sacred, choral, and much else. He has achieved great success with a number of them, placing him easily among the leading Scottish composers from the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. 1990 was a watershed time for MacMillan: that year his theatrical piece Búsqueda (1988) was introduced at the Edinburgh International Festival, and his orchestral work The Confession of Isobel Gowdie was premiered at a Proms concert, both events catapulting him to national as well as international notice. The latter opus and his percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel are probably MacMillan's most popular large works. MacMillan's style incorporates some modernist characteristics (leftovers from his youth), but on the whole his music, with its use of Scottish folk music; his quite ……
From Allmusic

Tenebrae bring their trademark passion and precision to this live performance of music by J. S. Bach and Sir James MacMillan, to be recorded live at Snape Maltings in May 2023. Renowned for their technical difficulty, Bach’s motets are pillars of the choral repertoire, requiring minute attention to detail as well as a full emotional range. Here, Tenebrae performs the three most well-known of the set, culminating in the joyful Singet dem Herrn. Like Bach, Sir James MacMillan has written much of his music for the church, and his settings of the Tenebrae responsories paint a vivid picture of the events of Holy Week. This album also features the premiere recording of I saw Eternity the other night, which MacMillan composed for Tenebrae in 2021 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the London Bach Society.