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’.
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