James MacMillan's
ST JOHN PASSION
World premiere, 27 April 2008
Barbican Hall, London
Sir Colin Davis conductor
London Symphony Orchestra
Christopher Maltman baritone
Narrator Chorus
London Symphony Chrous
Click on the link below to hear James MacMillan discussing his St John Passion with Sandy Burnett:
Co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Rundfunk Chor Berlin, James Macmillan's St John Passion is a major new sacred work. Dedicated to Sir Colin Davis in his 80th birthday year, the world premiere was held in London's Barbican Hall as part of the LSO's major Belief Series, receiving both a standing ovation and critical acclaim. Over the next two years it will be performed in Boston, Amsterdam and Germany.
Press reaction:
"James MacMillan has delivered a St John Passion that stirred its premiere audience to a standing ovation... The basis was choral: a small ad hoc professional group sang narrations from St John's Gospel in modern translation, often using chanted rhythms in quick-moving block chords, and the large London Symphony Chorus took most of the dramatic roles in freer style, backed by full orchestra. One vocal soloist, the baritone Christopher Maltman, sang Christ in arioso-like episodes, but there were no full arias, a feature that helped to propel the urgently concise drama.
Each of the first nine parts ended with, or wove in towards the end, a more reflective section using external biblical or liturgical texts: the most complex and extended music in the work except for its final part, an orchestral meditation with gleams of hope in an embedded horn melody, but returning to gloom.
Maltman sought out the lyrical core of this striking portrayal, while acknowledging its angry edge. Both choruses delivered with panache, while Sir Colin Davis – in a work commissioned for his 80th birthday – conducted the LSO with the directness he brings to one of the select few living composers that he champions."
The Independent
| Click here to read James MacMillan's programme notes for the world premiere of the St John Passion |
"The end of Part One was masterly: no loudspeaker wailing as the Crucifixion loomed, but a resigned, pianissimo meditation, threaded with keening instrumental solos. Very affecting, as was the Passion's final instrumental retreat.
The London Symphony Chorus were tested hard, but emerged victorious. Among the LSO, the brass and timpanist won the decibel prize, but every section - squawking winds, stratospheric strings - played their part.
After a lifetime of Berlioz epics, Davis gripped this new challenge with ease. But MacMillan won the night's Oscar for making contemporary music matter. He undoubedly deserved his standing ovation."
The Times
"James MacMillan's setting of the St John Passion, which received its impressive world premiere at the weekend, is a natural outcome of the religious and humanitarian concerns that have fuelled his music in recent years.
In typical MacMillan fashion, this is not a Passion that pulls any punches. Much of the music is grittily direct, with apocalyptic orchestral eruptions that, in the first part at any rate, keep the volume of sound at a fairly high level.
The compelling performance, conducted by Davis with the LSO, London Symphony Chorus and handpicked Narrator Chorus, transcended the score's significant technical demands to underline the depth of feeling and tremendous emotional impact that MacMillan has achieved in this powerful score."
The Daily Telegraph
"No composer writing a St John Passion today can be oblivious to the models of Bach, three centuries old though they may be.
James MacMillan, with his religious background, is certainly aware of that benevolent shadow. But his new St John Passion, receiving its world premiere under its dedicatee, Colin Davis, is at its most distinctive and original precisely where it departs from its exemplars.
Where Bach gives his narration to an Evangelist, MacMillan gives it to a semi-chorus which sweeps the story forward equally rapidly in a curious form of harmonised chant, with Semitic overtones.
Each of the nine choral movements ends with the main vocal group (the LSO Chorus in splendid voice) meditating or declaiming in Latin. There is only one solo voice, that of Christus, a strenuous part but one to which Christopher Maltman rose heroically, delivering the richly dramatic word-setting to fine effect. At key moments of Christ’s declamation, the orchestra explodes in a sunburst of sound — equivalent, perhaps, to the halo effect of the orchestrated recitatives in Bach’s Matthew Passion.
That is one of many striking moments in MacMillan’s work: another is the Gesualdo-like sublimity of the chorus that ends the first part, all the more compelling for its contrast with extended passages of strident fulmination.
MacMillan’s is an angry response to the Passion story, its oases of tranquillity and reflection few and far between. The LSO crackled vigorously under Davis, finding peace only in the sombre beauty of the final, elegiac instrumental section."
Evening Standard
"To tread where Bach trod takes a particular kind of courage, but James MacMillan has been buoyed up by his own religious faith in essaying a new version of the story of the Crucifixion – and also by the fact that this commission was at the invitation of the man who would conduct it.
Sir Colin Davis wanted the Scottish composer to be the founder of the feast at his 80th birthday concert with the London Symphony Orchestra. The gestation process took two hard years, as MacMillan wrestled with some big questions: how many soloists; what to replace Bach's chorales with; how to do the narration; and how to represent Christ. His solutions are respectively: one; Latin motets; a small mixed choir; and baritone Christopher Maltman.
It soon became clear that he was going to marry a variety of different musical modes into one sound-world: the Latin motets have a sweet urgency reminiscent both of 16th-century church music, Middle-Eastern chant, and of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex; the main chorus delivered massive blocks of sound, sometimes suggesting Russian Orthodox influences, at others the influence of Finland and Estonia; Christ's utterances were pure 20th-century atonalism, melismatic flights for which the words were mere pretexts. The effect was rich, at times almost overwhelmingly so.
After half an hour of unrelieved declamation one began to feel that the composer had put all his goods in the window too soon, but then came a series of surprises, as he brought in exotic percussion to magical effect. No praise can be too high for the LSO or its chorus under Davis's inspired baton, while Maltman was incandescently superb. A riveting and remarkable work; a new-minted classic."
The Scotsman
"It is not often you see the Archbishop of Canterbury lead a standing ovation, but Dr Rowan Williams was among the first on their feet at the Barbican last week when James MacMillan took his bow after the world premiere of his monumental St John Passion. Clearly, the archbishop shared the ecstatic audience's view that a great new work had entered the repertoire.
The spectre of Bach hovers over any attempt to refresh the Passion story, but MacMillan, a devout Catholic, is equal to the challenge..."
The Observer