“A towering performance by the BBC Philharmonic under the composer James MacMillan. He is proving a conductor of daunting ability.” The Sunday Times
James MacMillan is one of today’s most successful living composers and is also internationally active as a conductor. His musical language is flooded with influences from his Scottish heritage, Roman Catholic faith, social conscience and close connection with Celtic folk music, blended together with influences from Far Eastern, Scandinavian and Eastern European music.
MacMillan first became internationally recognised after the extraordinary success of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the BBC Proms in 1990. His prolific output has since been performed and broadcast around the world, placing him in the front rank of today’s composers. His major works include percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, which has received more than 400 performances, a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich, large scale choral-orchestral work Quickening, and three symphonies. Recent major works include his new opera The Sacrifice, premiered by Welsh National Opera and conducted by MacMillan, and his St John Passion, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Colin Davis in 2008, with performances in 2009 and 2010 by co-commissioners the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Boston Symphony and Rundfunkchor Berlin.
MacMillan was appointed Affiliate Composer of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in 1990, and between 1992 and 2002 he was Artistic Director of the Philharmonia Orchestra's Music of Today series. In January 2005 MacMillan was the focus of a major retrospective in the BBC Symphony’s annual composer weekend at London’s Barbican Centre, where he conducted concerts with both the BBC Philharmonic and BBC Symphony Orchestra. In 2009, MacMillan won the prestigious Ivor Novello Classical Music Award and the British Composer Award for Liturgical Music.
MacMillan was recently announced as Principal Guest Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Kamer Filharmonie, a post he will take up from the 2010/11 season, following 9 years as Composer/Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic. He has conducted orchestras such as the Baltimore Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Melbourne Symphony. Highlights of last season include 'James MacMillan: The Story so Far', a season long focus on his music in Rotterdam, in which he conducted both the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Royal Flemish Philharmonic, while in London MacMillan conducted the Britten Sinfonia at the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre, in a new Katie Mitchell production of his music theatre work Parthenogenesis.
During the 2009/10 season, MacMillan is the focus of an ‘Artist Portrait’ by the London Symphony Orchestra. Having conducted the orchestra in the 2009 City of London Festival, further highlights include the world premiere of his new Violin Concerto with Vadim Repin, conducted by Valery Gergiev, a revival of the St John Passion under the baton of Sir Colin Davis, and performances of his trumpet concerto Epiclesis and an education project based on his work for ensemble and orchestra Into the Ferment, both conducted by Kristjan Järvi. Also this season, MacMillan conducts the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in his St John Passion (a work which is also presented as part of the King’s College Cambridge Easter Festival under Stephen Cleobury), as well as the BBC Philharmonic, Florida Orchestra, Kymi Sinfonietta, Västerås Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in a Royal Ballet production of MacMillan’s Tryst, which is also presented this season by the Dutch Ballet in Amsterdam.
James MacMillan has directed many of his own works on disc for Chandos, BIS and BMG; his latest releases include an LSO Live disc of his St John Passion with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis, and a Chandos recording of his large scale work Quickening and The Sacrifice: Three Interludes. This season MacMillan records A Deep but Dazzling Darkness and his percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel with Colin Currie and the Netherlands Radio Kamer Filharmonie, and an acclaimed performance of his Seven Last Words has recently been released by the Dimitri Ensemble for Naxos. MacMillan was awarded a CBE in January 2004.
James MacMillan is represented by Intermusica. www.intermusica.co.uk/macmillan.
The works of James MacMillan are published by Boosey & Hawkes. October 2009 / 645 words. Not to be altered without permission. Please destroy all previous biographical material.
Any MacMillan works; any contemporary composers; Stravinsky, Britten, Ives, Mendelssohn, Schnittke, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Messaien, Prokofiev.
Detroit Symphony, May 2006
MACMILLAN Britannia
MOZART Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467
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ELGAR Enigma Variations
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, April 2007
BRITTEN Four Sea Interludes
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Symphony No. 4
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MACMILLAN Quickening
BBC Philharmonic, March 2008
MACMILLAN The Sacrifice Suite (premiere)
KANCHELI Symphony No. 5
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GORECKI Symphony No. 3
Karlsruhe Staatskapelle, May 2006
MACMILLAN Britannia
SIBELIUS Symphony No.3
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VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis
MACMILLAN The Confession of Isobel Gowdie
RTVE Symphony Orchestra, Madrid
FERNANDEZ ALVES Fantasia Maya
MARTINSSON Trumpet Concerto
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PROKOFIEV Symphony No.6
Britten Sinfonia, November 2005
STRAVINSKY Suite No.1 for small orchestra
SIBELIUS Kuolema: Valse triste
SALLY BEAMISH Aurora (percussion concerto)
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MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 4 "Italian" 27'
Bath Festival Chorus, May 2005
BRITTEN Festival Te Deum
BRUCKNER Graduale: Christus factus est
TIPPETT Magnificat
MACMILLAN Mass
POULENC Litanies à la Vierge noir
POULENC Quatre petites prières de Saint François d'Assise
MACMILLAN Cantos Sagrados
NHK Symphony Tokyo, July 2004
JOHANNES MARIA STAUD Polygon
MISATO MOCHIZUK new work (concerto)
MAKI ISHII Symphonic Poem 'Illusion and Death'
JAMES MACMILLAN The Confession of Isobel Gowdie
Northern Sinfonia, January 2004
BRITTEN Simple Symphony
SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concerto No.1
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BRITTEN Suite on English Folk Tunes "A time there was"
MACMILLAN Tryst
BBC Philharmonic, March 2005
MACMILLAN Magnificat & Nunc Dimmitus
POULENC Organ Concerto
JUDITH BINGHAM Chartres (new work)
Britten Sinfonia, November 2004
BRITTEN Prelude & Fugue
MACMILLAN Piano Concerto No. 2
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ARVO PÄRT Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten
BARTOK Music for Strings, Percussion & Celeste
Britten-Pears Orchestra, April 2005
BRITTEN Four Sea Interludes
DEBUSSY La Mer
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MACMILLAN Seven Last Words from the Cross
Sydney Symphony, August 2004
Karl VINE Percussion Symphony
MACMILLAN Britannia
ELGAR Enigma Variations
Melbourne Symphony, August 2004
MACMILLAN Britannia
RICHARD MILLS Trumpet Concerto
MENDELSSOHN Symphony No.3 in A minor (Scottish) Op. 56
Residentie Orkest, March 2004
MACMILLAN Britannia
BRETT DEAN Ariel's Music
NIELSEN Symphony No. 5
Residentie Orkest, November 2004
LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA Marsia
BRUNO MADERNA Quadrivium
LUCIANO BERIO Sinfonia
West Australian Symphony Orchestra, June 2003
MACMILLAN Seven Last Words from the Cross
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MESSIAEN Et Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum
BBC Philharmonic, May 2003
BIRTWISTLE Cry of Anubis (Tuba concerto)
BIRTWISTLE Exody
BIRTWISTLE Bach Measures
BBC Philharmonic, October 2004
LINDBERG Parada
LINDBERG Clarinet Concerto
LINDBERG Concerto for Orchestra
Rotterdam Philharmonic, March 2002
TORKE Ash
BRITTEN Nocturne
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MENDELSSOHN Symphony No.3 in A minor "Scottish" Op. 56
The Florida Orchestra & Jame MacMillan, cond / MacMillan, Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams
"The Florida Orchestra has done an excellent thing by bringing in Scottish composer James MacMillan to conduct not only his own music but also that of Ralph Vaughan Williams, an earlier British master with whom he clearly has a kinship.
MacMillan's Interludes opened the concert with a compact display of his gift for orchestral color, especially in the percussion writing. The way that moments of shimmering delicacy and precision were punctuated by mighty blasts in the brass and percussion reminded me of Shostakovich. The orchestra gave an alert performance for the composer, whose conducting style is clear and energetic.
Part of MacMillan's mission in coming to Florida was to spread the gospel of British music, and he succeeded splendidly on that score with Vaughan Williams' Symphony No.4... Amid the tumult there was a lush loveliness to the music under MacMillan's baton, as in the surprisingly gentle dissonance of the opening theme and the dreamy flute solo that ended the second movement. The frenetic finish left the audience in stunned silence before breaking into applause."
St. Petersburg Times, Florida, November 2009
Dmitri Ensemble & Graham Ross / MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross (Naxos)
“Commissioned by the BBC in 1993 and first broadcast on television during Easter week of the following year, Seven Last Words from the Cross is one of James MacMillan’s most enduring achievements, a work to which I have found myself returning more than almost any other in his extensive output. It’s a grippingly intense and enviably concentrated setting for double choir and string orchestra of Jesus’s final utterances combined with texts from other liturgical sources (most notably the Good Friday Responsaries for Tenebrae). Inspiration runs consistently high in this nourishing cantata, not least at the start of the second movement where three times the choir arrestingly cries “Woman, Behold, Thy Son!” (the tension in the silence between the phrases is mesmeric), the third movement’s spellbindingly beautiful treatment of the Good Friday versicle Ecce lignum Crucis, those jagged string chords which launch the sixth movement (“It is finished”) or, perhaps above all, the achingly expressive Scottish lament that is the orchestral postlude, the string-writing bearing MacMillan’s hallmark “keening” style (Jesus’s dying breaths are quite extraordinarily moving)….technically speaking the disc is little short of a triumph in its combination of truthful sonority and wholly natural perspective. Richly rewarding listening, all of it, and a classy 50th birthday tribute to MacMillan.”
Gramophone Magazine (Editor’s Choice), September 2009
Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Tryst
“Tryst is a challenging powerhouse of a piece, the sparky raw energy and the thwack of the double basses in particular, reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring…it was impossible not to hear the piece with completely different ears as well as marvel at MacMillan's consummate skill as a composer.”
The Scotsman, 30 September 2009
Royal Scottish National Orchestra / The Confession of Isobel Gowdie
“The Confession of Isobel Gowdie is as violent and visceral as The Rite of Spring, to which MacMillan clearly pays homage (with whiplash repeated chords for full orchestra for example, and the thumpingly primordial brass refrains). But the fantastic ending — an anguished string threnody, rich with Gaelic glissandos, that seems to lament the fate of all 4,500 Scottish women burnt as witches during and after the Reformation — moves me to tears.”
The Times, August 2009
“James MacMillan’s parodic Britannia provided an equally knock-about opening to the second half of the concert, but it was his The Confession of Isobel Gowdie which finally set the evening alight…It remains a deeply powerful work almost two decades on.”
HI-Arts, August 2009
Nash Ensemble / Tuireadh
“James MacMillan makes a speciality of writing music commemorating terrible accidents or atrocities. To his detractors that puts him in the same slightly dubious bracket as ambulance-chasing lawyers. But a socially responsible composer surely has a duty to reflect, and reflect upon, public anguish — to articulate through music those churning feelings that cannot easily be put into words. And the 50-year-old Scot does that supremely well.
He wrote his clarinet quintet Tuireadh more than 18 years ago, in memory of the 167 men who died in the 1988 Piper Alpha oil-platform disaster off the Scottish coast. It constantly mulls over the same musical material — like a grieving wife or mother, perhaps, constantly asking “why?” and getting no answers, or at least no answers that provide consolation. That material includes an ethereal, chorale-like refrain using harmonics; string glissandos that evoke the mournful “keening” of Gaelic vocal music; single notes that grow from inaudibility, like a gentle waft of breeze stirring sullen sea waves; and, by way of contrast, explosive and violently jagged cadenzas, particularly for the clarinet.
[The piece] seems to encapsulate perfectly the clashing public sentiments about the Piper Alpha tragedy — the desolation and helplessness; the anger and disbelief; the grief, but also the surge of communal compassion for the bereaved and the victims. It also evokes powerfully the sea itself: eternal, untameable, and imperturbable to human misfortune.”
The Times, July 2009
“James MacMillan, a Scottish composer, is as intellectually rigorous as any of his predecessors but has the priceless gift of connecting with audiences. The norm for performances of contemporary music was a premiere and perhaps one or two further subsidised repeats, then deserved obscurity. MacMillan's music has entered the mainstream repertoire because audiences want to hear it.”
The Times, 25 August 2008
“MacMillan brought obvious authority to the podium and drew some lively playing from the BSO strings in the concerto… The edgy, unpredictable qualities in MacMillan's music helped to reiterate just how edgy and unpredictable Beethoven could be, even in such an early symphony as this one. Every sudden dynamic shift in the latter recalled to mind all the surprises in the former... Beethoven's Second Symphony is particularly rich in potent ideas, as MacMillan illustrated in remarks to the audience before going on to produce a thoughtful, invigorating performance. He offered much more than mere traffic control, emphasizing the work's sinewy power and paying attention to the subtleties that give it so much character. The orchestra jumped into the action with impressive force.”
The Baltimore Sun, 5 April 2008
“For audiences who think they hate modern music, there's nothing to fear here… this music is wild stuff, but it's good, vigorous music and deserves to be performed by major ensembles... A scintillating reading of Beethoven's delightful but infrequently performed Symphony No. 2… The players executed Mr. MacMillan's sunny concept of the work with infectious enthusiasm, particularly in the quirky scherzo and the rousing finale.”
The Washington Times, 5 April 2008
"Fervently Scottish, fervently Catholic, fervently fervent, he writes music like Wilberforce or Lincoln wrote speeches: burning with righteous anger, infused with missionary passion, vivid in language, and without a whiff of pretension or obfuscation. And his energy is inexhaustible: in his mid-forties, he has already produced nearly 150 major works."
The Times, April 2007
"James MacMillan's percussion feast Veni, Veni Emmanuel, with the vigorously wonderful Colin Currie... where Currie and Alsop were in perfect synch, riding the score's tumultuous journey from strife through joy to the ting-a-ling Easter coda. Exciting music, excitingly performed."
The Times, February 2007
"A new James MacMillan recording is always an event, and his organ and piano concertos both offer unfailingly inventive music."
Classical Music, December 2006
"Three days later Hereford Cathedral heard the first UK performance of James MacMillan's extraordinary Sun-Dogs, a Three Choirs co-commission with organisations in the United States, Netherlands and Canada. Written with immense assurance and vivid imagination, Sun-Dogs is another of MacMillan's works proudly drawn from the Catholic faith, extracts from the Roman Missal seasoning this setting of a complex, allegorical poem by Michael Symmons Roberts.
Its five movements are set for large unaccompanied choir, and the Festival Chorus, under the composer's compelling direction, brought it vividly to life.
All sorts of choral and compositional devices are employed here, ranging from a Pendereckian overlapping or repeated textures delivered in free time to insouciant whistling, a hurly-burly of response which at times becomes almost sacramental, as in the fourth movement, quoting directly from The Last Supper."
Classical Music, December 2006
"Scotch Bestiary is full of a black vitality which always threatens to explode into pure chaos. ... It's all brought off with tremendous zest by Wayne Marshall and the BBC Philharmonic under the composer's direction; but they're just as much at home in the contemplative, painfully affectionate parts of the Concerto."
BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2006
"MacMillan himself conducted the BBC Philharmonic for Saturday's Pickaquoy Centre performance of his own The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. Sixteen years on from the performances that established his name, the composer produced a seamless, swift account of the score."
The Herald, June 2006
"On Monday night, at St Magnus Cathedral, MacMillan conducted the Scottish Ensemble and Cappella Nova in a beautiful performance of his 1994 piece Seven Last Words from the Cross, an experience almost as demanding of an enthralled audience as it was of the performers, and as powerful as Mackay Brown's poetry in its sense of the deep, mysterious silence that must follow all human utterance, and all our attempts to make sense - or art - of our short time in the light."
The Scotsman, June 2006
"[The Confession of Isobel Gowdie is] a moving, subtle elegiac response to his [MacMillan's] own work which he himself describes as a requiem."
The Scotsman, June 2006
"Throughout, Benedetti's gently ardent playing, nimbly articulate in the finale, is enhanced by a lively and detailed response from the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. James MacMillan, now developing a career as a conductor of varied repertoire, ensures a tactile response from the orchestra, with some lovely woodwing contributions, all of which ensures a new-minted account of this loveliest of concertos.
MacMillan's own From Ayrshire is an atmospheric conclusion to this release, the violinist musing on a Scottish song (the well-known 'Ca the Yowes', seemingly the creation of Robert Burns, rather than being of the 'folk' variety). Such reflections turns to greater emotional import; it's a heart-touching piece that concludes with an energetic, somewhat crazed (maybe inebriated) reel."
Classical Source, May 2006
"It was refreshing to find the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Northern College of Music collaborating on a small festival celebrating the music of the 54-year-old composer Poul Ruders. James Macmillan conducted the BBC Philharmonic, the fleet strings alternately fidgeting restlessly and drawing long, sweeping brush-strokes in music with defined, sculptural textures. Pointed woodwind added such colour that you hardly noticed the absence of percussion."
The Independent, February 2006
"James MacMillan's Cantos Sagrados , combining poems concerning political repression in Latin America with liturgical texts in Latin, is surely among the best products of his first flood of inspiration. It is characteristically raw and derivative in places, but also occasionally ravishing, and full of integrity."
The Independent, January 2006
“…the great virtue of these marvellous BBC composer weekends [is that] they allow us to roam around a composer’s inner world, and see how it changes over time, and how the elements acquire weight and subtlety. Of course that’s only valuable if the composer in question really has conjured a world worth getting to know, and this weekend made it clear MacMillan is one of the few British composers who have.”
The Daily Telegraph, January 2005
"The BBC Symphony Chorus crackled with vigour and crisp enunciation: a tribute to their talent and drilling, and MacMillan's early gift for the immediate, dramatic and emotional."
The Times, January 2005
"...[MacMillan's] music has an immense heat and appetite, seizing hold of other musical references and bending them to it's will."
The Daily Telegraph, January 2005
"I wish I knew what James MacMillan eats for breakfast. With 120 compositions already under his belt, the flying Scot is writing music with as much fervour and ingenuity as anyone on the planet. As was amply demonstrated by this BBC weekend devoted to his music, his passion and energy seem inexhaustible... he is, paradoxically, the most powerful voice in British music today - by a mile. Though fused from a thousand diverse sacred and secular influences, his pieces are instantly recognisable, intellectually coherent, fizzing with ideas, gloriously coloured, and without a whiff of pretension or obfuscation. And who knows how his imagination will ripen, darken or deepen in the years ahead. After all, he is only 45."
The Times, January 2005
"The sense of whimsy inspired by the sight of pickup-sticks organ pipes bursting forth behind the stage led MacMillan through a stage of mental associations: Disney, cartoons, the Warner Bros classics, their daffy Carl Stalling soundtracks. What MacMillan has come up with is a two-part, quirkily animated concerto... a musical book of fanciful animals impersonated by organ and orchestra... MacMillan seems at times almost a Scottish Ives. But what sounds he gets from both orchestra and organ! And with Marshall, we finally get an organist with big-time flair and technique... to have one's ears seduced and trampled by this musical monster, an ever-transmogrifying musical trickster, is an experience not to be found anywhere else."
Los Angeles Times
"The piece was certainly fun: riotous, at times cacophonous, wittily orchestrated and cleverly structured. It also brilliantly integrated the organ into the orchestra proper. Reptiles and fish were conjured on organ pedals and tuba, with percussion and other brasses lending texture. Buzzing from the organ effectively suggested a queen bee, and a snare drum gave the howler monkey his martial personality... All these things (and more) merged in the work's second half, a crazy but exciting amalgam..."
Los Angeles Daily News
“…an orchestral concert delivered with supreme confidence by the BBC Philharmonic under James MacMillan…given a conductor as attuned as MacMillan to large-scale drama as well as to immediacy of impact, and given an orchestra for whom no challenge is too much, the sheer élan of the writing was again hard to resist.”
The Daily Telegraph , October 2004
“That is MacMillan’s great gift: to make a complex but white-hot passion immediately coherent and persuasive.”
The Times , August 2004
“Veni, Veni, Emmanuel with composer James MacMillan on the conductor’s podium was a great experience… A particular highlight is the intimate middle movement where the marimba, beautifully accompanied by the orchestra, was completely spellbinding…A night to remember!”
Nya Wermlands-Tiodningen , March 2004
“Fortunately, the was no unruly behaviour from the SSO, which was in obedient form, responding to MacMillan’s clear direction with precision and verve, needed not only in his own work but in Elgar’s momentous Enigma Variations…some splendid brass playing summoned the radiance of a summer’s day in Elgar’s Malvern Hills.”
Sydney Morning Herald , August 2004
“The Scotsman is a splendid conductor who took extraordinary care with the two works of his colleague and infinite care with the first performance in Spain of his own Third Symphony.”
Crítica el País , May 2004
“The composer himself conducted a pair of choral works…His setting of the cantat’s third section felt like a Flemish old-master Crucifixion paining in sound: delicate, agonizing and of imperishable beauty.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution , April 2004
“Composers who turn to conducting aren’t always successful, but James MacMillan is emerging as a strong, assured interpreter of his own music, and the Chandos recordings do him full justice.”
BBC Music Magazine, September 2003
“A towering performance by the BBC Philharmonic under the composer James MacMillan. He is proving a conductor of daunting ability.”
The Sunday Times, May 2003
“MacMillan’s work, A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, is tremendously dramatic… the orchestration also grips the ear with its unearthly sonorities, sour quarter-tones and howling singers (in fact MacMillan’s own voice, multi-tracked on tape). It was brilliantly delivered by the LSO Ensemble directed by the composer himself.”
The Times, March 2003
“The most exciting young British composer to have emerged in the 1990s.”
The Guardian
“There is something special about hearing the work of a pupil interpreted by his or her teacher. Perhaps it is the sense of a mentor having a special insight into the music, even having shaped it, which lends the stamp of authority. A similar feeling of authenticity informed James MacMillan’s direction of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) in a world premiere by his Royal Scottish Academy pupil Edward Rushton… This compelling performance capped an evening’s music-making of exceptional quality in an intelligently planned programme.”
The Independent, December 2001
“The Sydney Symphony Orchestra went at it hammer and tongs in its latest Town Hall concert of recent music under the direction of the Scottish composer James MacMillan.”
Sydney Morning Herald, November 2001