James MacMillan’s oratorio leaves listeners in an uplifting glow
There are five days to go until Christmas: 6 days in which to purchase the most rousing musical present currently on offer. It’s a recording of the British premiere of James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, initially delayed by Covid restrictions but finally unleashed last December at the Festival Hall with its commissioning body, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Mark Elder.
This fiery Scot has form when it comes to writing big pieces of a religious bent, particularly his stirring Passion settings. He’s masterful in small pieces too, as in his anthem for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral. Even so, this oratorio seems exceptional in the directness of its musical language and ability to leave listeners of every stripe bathed in an uplifting glow.
The ears are immediately gripped by the folk-carol twang and twinkling celesta in the opening sinfonia, the first of four orchestral movements threaded through a vocal tapestry mixing Gospel passages with Catholic ritual, metaphysical poetry and a Gaelic lullaby. Tone and manner equally keep shifting: you get choral chanting, scurrying strings, blistering brass chords, chortling winds, sweet simplicity and thunderous violence, with ecstasy radiating at the close.
Lucy Crowe’s two soprano arias couldn’t be more eloquent and Roderick Williams’s baritone contributions are only a few paces behind. As for Elder, the orchestra and the superb LPO choir — all of them seem on fire, confident in attack, secure in the knowledge that MacMillan has written a masterpiece of uncommon and piercing power.
The British musical forces are a lot smaller in Echo, a typically striking recital from the soprano Ruby Hughes and her pianist partner Huw Watkins — the composer too of the title song cycle, a brilliantly effective meditation on different shades of grief and loss. Wrapped around it come Purcell, Bach and folk songs, mediated mostly through arrangements by Britten, and other well-chosen pleasures. Hughes’s vibrato-light voice is extremely expressive even when her volume’s turned low, as it is, you may feel, for slightly too much of the time. But, whispered or not, this is still a most thoughtful and tender album. (London Philharmonic Orchestra; BIS)