Macmillan pillages musical history in overblown symphony
The Sixteen Britten Sinfonia Barbican, London EC2
If sheer ambition, burning sincerity of intention and deafening climaxes are enough to make a masterpiece, then James Macmillan’s new symphony Le Grand Inconnu (The Great Unknown) must be one. He takes on the loftiest theme – the nature of the Holy Spirit – and calls on every musical resource to paint its mystery.
The singers of The Sixteen, the Britten Sinfonia chamber orchestra and conductor Harry Christophers certainly gave their all. And there were moments during this 50-minute, three-movement piece that were poetically suggestive. The very beginning, which evoked the breath of the spirit in subdued whisperings and fluty harmonics, was one such. The opening of the second movement, which summoned the “life-giving waters of the spirit” with wide-eyed chimings on piano, harp and plucked strings, was another.
The problem is that Macmillan no sooner thinks of an idea than he pumps it with steroids, so that it will be more awe-struck, innocent, joyous or whatever. Or worse, he transforms it (with undeniable skill) into something completely different. So a bit of cod-renaissance polyphony might morph into a hazy tangled weave borrowed from György Ligeti, or rapt choral clusters lifted from Arvo Pärt, the religious composer. No corner of musical history remained unpillaged. At one point, where horns joined in the swirling evocation of the Spirit, I thought Wagner’s Rhinemaidens were about to swim from behind the drums.
The basic problem with Macmillan’s new piece is that it is so monumentally tactless. He’s bought into the idea that 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, titled The Sun Danced, was similarly frustrating, in that 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.