MomsMobley Posted January 8, 2015 Report Share Posted January 8, 2015 any fans Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjazzg Posted January 8, 2015 Report Share Posted January 8, 2015 of Evelyn Glennie? Yes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Ayers Posted January 8, 2015 Report Share Posted January 8, 2015 The one piece of MacMillan I have heard in concert was The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (LSO/Davis, March 2007). At that time, I was only familiar with Veni Veni Emmanuel in the Colin Currie recording on Naxos. I had begun to find that a little too straight in terms of its treatment of the well-known theme - and still do - but Confession, which I now rehear on the LSO Live recording, I very much like. Nothing else of the little I have heard of MacMillan in recordings has won me over, though he is performed here every year, I suppose, and I am pretty sure I will be going to hear something of his again soon. Have there been pieces since Gowdie and VVE which are especially exciting or did he peak early, do you think? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Ayers Posted January 8, 2015 Report Share Posted January 8, 2015 OK now I am ashamed. I looked at the list of MacmIllan compositions on wikipedia and was surprised how many of them were LSO commissions or co-commissions, and fp here under eminent conductors. I *was* aware that I had been consciously passing over opportunities to hear MacmIllan - I just hadn't realised how many I had missed So the new motto is: sneak ten Macmillan premieres past me once - shame on you: sneak another ten past me - shame on me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Stryker Posted January 8, 2015 Report Share Posted January 8, 2015 (edited) Generally, I like what I've heard, even if reservations pop up at times. Have heard a number of pieces in concert going back to "Veni Veni" (with Glennie) which is a knockout. Others have struck me overbearing and overeager; but I'm always interested in more of his music. FWIW, here are excerpts from two of my Detroit Free Press reviews, the first from 2006 and the second from last spring: ------ It was disconcerting that the hilarious raspberry of sound that opens Scotsman James MacMillan's "Britannia" -- squished together military tunes, an Irish reel, absurd quotes like "God Save the Queen" and intemperate duck calls and car horn blats -- elicited nary a chuckle from those sitting near me Thursday at Orchestra Hall. C'mon, people. This is funny stuff! One of the problems with contemporary musical life is that the concert hall has become so starched that listeners are afraid to surrender to the obvious. There is humor in classical music: Haydn's witty turns of melody and dynamics; dead-pan "wrong notes" in Prokofiev; Charles Ives' thumb-in-the-eye send-ups of gentility; biting satire in Shostakovich. Sure, high-modernism can be dry-as-dust. After all, nothing kills a party like combinatorial hexachords. But postmodernists are a jolly bunch, from John Adams in his trickster mode to John Zorn creating zany collages inspired by cartoon music; a bit of Bugs Bunny Dada has also seeped into "Britannia." Which brings us back to MacMillan (b. 1959), who is conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's mostly British program this week, culminating in Edward Elgar's "Enigma Variations." Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 is an incongruous interloper, but soloist Stephen Hough is a Brit. (In pre-concert remarks, MacMillan suggested the concerto's light touch links the piece with his and Elgar's, but this is a stretch.) MacMillan's music often references his Catholic faith, but the 13-minute "Britannia" represents his jester side. The delights include a curiously thumping tom-tom and snatches of harp beneath a solo violin jig and brittle marches that interrupt limpid pastorals. But then the pace slows and the music turns darker, dappled by somber dissonance. Glassy strings add a chilly glare. The high jinks return but now the jokes seem less funny than disturbing. The nose-thumbing tweaks of Mother England have morphed into pointed comments on the evils of xenophobic nationalism. That's a clever switcheroo that MacMillan pulls off beautifully. ... ------ It's hard to imagine new works for piano as different in style, temperament, form and effect as the pieces by James MacMillan and Charles Wuorinen that were introduced to metro Detroit over the weekend. This makes perfect sense given these composers' biographies: At 75, Wuorinen, a native New Yorker, is one of the grand old men of high modernism, known for the knotty complexity and expressive muscularity of his scores. MacMillan, a Scotsman born in 1959, came of age in the 1980s and early '90s, when composers were exploring more eclectic languages, and he has consistently drawn inspiration from Catholic faith. Still, the contrast between MacMillan's Piano Concerto No. 3, played by Jean-Yves Thibaudet with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Wuorinen's "Intrada, " given its world premiere Sunday by Peter Serkin for the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, opened a revealing window on our pluralist age. In an era in which no single compositional style reigns supreme, the governing motto recalls bandleader Jimmie Lunceford's dictum from 1938: T'ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. Premiered in 2011, MacMillan's 25-minute concerto titled "The Mysteries of Light" is fundamentally tonal, expansive in form, ecstatic in expression, gleaming and clangorous in its scoring and programmatic in intent. MacMillan's Catholic faith, specifically the rosary, provides the program, and the music often sounds as if the composer were trying to capture the vastness of the great beyond. Looming large is the shadow of Olivier Messiaen, the indispensable 20th Century French composer, also heavily influenced by Catholicism. Messiaen's raucous mysticism has left its mark on MacMillan's score in the blaring brass, dazzling pianistic pirouettes, animated and tolling percussion and otherworldly harmony. A fleeting plainsong refrain opens the work and reoccurs as a linking device; the music unfolds in five episodic and dramatic sections. The piano writing is unremittingly virtuosic, ridiculously so at times, yet at Friday morning's performance Thibaudet untangled even the swiftest passages with a pristine clarity and a remarkable lightness of being. Still, MacMillan's melodic material is not always memorable, and the relentless speed and shattering climaxes eventually began to sound mannered, longwinded and a little vulgar. ... Edited January 8, 2015 by Mark Stryker Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Ayers Posted January 8, 2015 Report Share Posted January 8, 2015 Thanks for posting those, Mark. Good reviews! I know MacMillan's fun side. The concert I attended included Mozart's K467 and Tchaikovsky 4, so as a curtain raiser MacMillan had knocked off a very short, occasional piece called Stomp (with Fate and Elvira) which toyed around boisterously with the themes from the Tchaikovsky ('Fate') and from the once so-called Elvira Madigan concerto. He did actually publish it (http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/James-MacMillan-Stomp-with-Fate-and-Elvira/51430) though whether anyone has since performed it is moot... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Ayers Posted January 8, 2015 Report Share Posted January 8, 2015 (edited) Incidentally, people might remember that MacMillan's rise had a lot to do with the first recording of Confession on a 1992 (?) Koch CD. I had the impression that the recording created the wider buzz around MacMillan that helped to open up opportunities. Not quite a Górecki moment but something like. That was rapidly followed by the work for Glennie, herself just becoming maybe the first classical percussion star, after which the doors were flung wide open for him. We should mention too that he has written a lot of sacred and other vocal music. I have heard at least one piece performed at Canterbury Cathedral but I really can't remember what... Edited January 8, 2015 by David Ayers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MomsMobley Posted January 9, 2015 Author Report Share Posted January 9, 2015 thanks for all this; nice work in public too, Mark. reason I asked is that though I'd noticed the # of CDs of MacMillan on BIS-- a label whose CDs I'm nearly always at least curious about-- I hadn't actually bought nor knowingly heard any and... though I'm not dismissive of sacred choral music, having heard some of it on Hyperion I shrugged it off as estimable but... eh. obviously, however, I was wrong and MacMillan has covered quite a bit of territory in numerous forms, including symphony, chamber music etc and, rather than drearily fucking pious a la Part (whom I've kinda paid lip service to before but now live wholly and happily without) or Tavener... (Taverner, however, YES.) MacMillian is surely Catholic but as Scottish socialist also... I'm intrigued. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Ayers Posted January 9, 2015 Report Share Posted January 9, 2015 The CD situation regarding MacMillan is a little frustrating. Chandos and BIS both did some of the works, and now MacMillan himself is conducting them for Challenge with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra. These series are independent and there are some overlaps, but they all seem to be on Spotify so there is plenty of opportunity to compare and contrast. Prompted by this thread, I am tackling the Challenge series first. There is more variety than I expected. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rooster_Ties Posted January 9, 2015 Report Share Posted January 9, 2015 My sole MacMillan disc is a BIS recording of his trumpet and clarinet concerti. Will give a listen soon (haven't spun it in recent memory), and report back here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MomsMobley Posted January 9, 2015 Author Report Share Posted January 9, 2015 forgot to mention, Mark, I laughed when you suggested parts of MacMillan "vulgar" because 1) I generally like vulgar and 2) that's a criticism oft leveled at Messiaen, whom I mostly adore. The Messiaen ---> MacMillan lineage is obvious to me, of course, though I'm suspecting there's a goodly amount of Vaughan Williams there too? And yes, David, I think MacMillan's prolific discography as composer-conductor threw me also; I think my current plan is to grab each BIS as I can... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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