Since it was the Day of Preparation

Small Concert Hall, Glasgow, 27/10/24

James MacMillan, composer, William Conway, conductor and cello, Matthew Brook, baritone, Hebrides Ensemble, singers from Dunedin Consort.

A day of revelation for me! 

I have long been a fan of James MacMillan and not just because he is an Ayrshire man like me - born and brought up in Cumnock a few miles down the road from Kilmarnock where I was born -but also because he is certainly Scotland’s finest living composer and amongst Britain’s best. Since 1990 James has made his reputation in the UK and abroad with small scale choral works and large scale operas plus instrumental works. I think his opera ‘Ines de Castro’ is one of the finest modern operas and deserves many more performances than it has. Despite being firmly based in Scotland James’ work is somewhat neglected here. I remember pointing out to Fergus Linehan, the previous Edinburgh Festival director, that there were no Scottish composers in the whole of the Festival one year and one of the jobs of the Festival was to bring the best of Scottish culture to the world. To be fair Fergus featured MacMillan in the following year’s concert! 

James MacMillan was brought up in Cumnock, which was a working class mining community, but it was also a musical community with brass bands, church choirs and of course singing in the pubs and clubs by local people. This was a pattern I remember from growing up in Hurlford; it was a mining village yet I listened to opera regularly at home from my parents and friends and we were taken regularly to concerts at the Grand Hall in Kilmarnock with visiting choirs and orchestras. James MacMillan has continued this tradition by mounting his own community music festival, The Cumnock Tryst, which has become a successful established part of local musical life in Scotland; indeed today’s work had been performed in Cumnock the night before and prior to that in the King’s Place in London.

This was indeed a day of revelation for me, to continue James MacMillan’s biblical theme, Since it was the Day of Preparation, which is based on the death of Christ and the Resurrection as told in St John’s Gospel. Firstly I had never heard the work before, despite it being written in 2011, so it was revelation to me. Fortunately, there is a very fine recording of it made in 2016 with Brindley Sherratt as Christ and today’s conductor William Conway conducting. James MacMillan’s orchestral and vocal works are challenging and it is a pleasure ( and a great help in review writing!) to reprise them on Apple Music. The work uses the text of the Gospel, sung here by five singers from the Dunedin Consort, Scotland’s finest small choral group, accompanied by five musicians from the Hebrides Ensemble, one of our finest small chamber music groups. Together they were excellent and compared very well with the 2016 recording.

Mathew Brook was a commanding Christ, sitting at the back of the hall with authority over the singers and the musicians. Soprano Joanna Songi stood out with a very powerful, almost at times too loud, voice and I wondered whether this was deliberate by the composer or the conductor to achieve a challenging impact.  Interestingly the recording doesn’t give the soprano such resonance. Lucy Goddard the alto, Benjamin Durrant the tenor, and Christopher Webb all sang well.

The musicians of the Hebrides were excellent in what is a difficult work. Elizabeth Kenny gave a virtuoso performance on the theorbo, Yann Ghiro was a spirited clarinettist, and Stephen Stirling made the French horn speak - often very loudly. Gabriella Dall ‘Olio was superb on the harp. William Conway was very much in charge with the cello and together they made this challenging work very accessible, indeed melodic at times.

The second revelation for me was the small hall at the Glasgow Concert Hall. This was my first visit and the acoustic blew me away. It is totally wrapped in wood and the resonance is amazing. The five singers and five musicians filled the hall with clear and powerful music. William Conway said afterwards that it compared very well with the King’s Place in London where they had just performed and is reckoned to have the best acoustic in London. It makes me eager to experience our new chamber music concert hall in Edinburgh currently under construction and again with the best acoustic design.

The third revelation came from a musical family I met before the concert, a mother and her two sons, aged 12 and 8. Both were studying music but I worried that they might find a non-stop 70 minute concert of challenging music too much for them. I needn’t have worried; they were perfectly behaved and totally attentive throughout, so much so that the conductor William Conway came along at the end to congratulate them on their attention and said he was very impressed. This demonstrated that even challenging music like James MacMillan’s can speak to the young, and that must be a good thing for the future of music in Scotland.

Finally James MacMillan is a very devout Catholic and this has influenced a lot of his choices in his music creation, but as one old music lover said to me at the end, “it was very good, but I do wish he would choose some themes other than religious ones”. I tend to agree. James is a great composer and I would love to see perhaps another great opera by him. Now that would be a great revelation!