All symphonies were sacred symphonies, once. Haydn began each day’s composition with a prayer, and ended every score with the words ‘Laus Deo’. ‘These thoughts cheered me up,’ he told his biographer Albert Dies. Haydn, like Mozart, was a lifelong Catholic, and the Swiss theologian Hans Küng has suggested that the daring, exuberance and glorious wholeness that characterises even Mozart’s secular music comes from a specifically Catholic understanding of the universe: of salvation perceived not as an object of struggle, but as an unshakable, all-embracing certainty.
Sir James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony concerns itself with the Holy Spirit, but he struggled to find an English phrase that did the job, so its title is Le grand inconnu. A useful hint of vagueness there — offering scope to change the subject in the face of those who can’t or won’t understand. But it’s always healthy to tweak the whiskers of prim progressives, and MacMillan’s programme note for this world première paid the most backhanded compliment imaginable to Darmstadt and the spectralists before falling largely silent on the supremely assured Great Unknown of the music itself.
And sure enough, I can tell you roughly what MacMillan’s Fifth does. What it says is something with which I’m still grappling, three days after witnessing a sizeable Usher Hall audience rise, cheering, to its feet. It’s a choral symphony, and in this performance with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Harry Christophers, the Sixteen served as a semi-chorus, with four singers stepping briefly out as soloists. Using sacred texts in English, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the three movements address the notion of the Spirit as air (or breath), as water, and as fire.
From that starting point, MacMillan rummages energetically through the whole toybox of musical colour and memory.
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