On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more haunting piece of music.
It begins in half-light, with pinpricks from the organ so widely spaced that you could be listening to a forbidding tone row from the Second Viennese School. A four-part choir enters in close harmony and you realise that those apparently unrelated notes hint at austerely beautiful chords encircling the melody.
In Carmel’s Shade is one of the smallest but brightest jewels in the MacMillan collection
There are moments when we could be listening to Palestrina, to César Franck, to Benjamin Britten – a reminder that MacMillan is fluent in more musical languages than most living composers. But then the cadences resolve in directions that only he would choose, and that reminds us that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he never sounds merely ‘eclectic’. (If you spot that word in a programme note, take my advice and make a run for the exit before the piece starts: it probably means the composer has shoplifted his inspiration.)
The first words are: ‘My little Sister waiting there’, and we’re told that she’s waiting ‘in Carmel’s shade’ – the title of the piece – which is significant because the author was a Carmelite nun. Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin became Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and, after she died in 1897 at the age of just 24, St Thérèse of Lisieux. For a time she was the most popular saint in the world. Perhaps she still is. When her relics visited Britain in 2009, the Guardian reported incredulously that ‘thousands queued around the block’ at their first port of call, Portsmouth’s Catholic cathedral.
Some of those people were hoping to be healed of disease, because Thérèse is the patron saint of illness.
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