ONE striking thing about James MacMillan’s new setting of the St John Passion, when set alongside Bach’s treatment, is the (arguably) very different feel of the text.
MacMillan’s new Passion had its première at the Barbican Hall in London the weekend before last. The composer has set the Revised Standard Version, with which he is familiar from its use in Holy Week at St Columba’s Dominican Church in Glasgow. Here and there, the cool, updated words underline the modern, post-Vatican II ethos of his work; and they also underpin the thrusting, contemporary feel of MacMillan’s choral writing.
On the other hand, the composer resorts at key points to more stylised extracts, sung in Latin. Jesus, here the only vocal soloist, is called Christus throughout. After his arrest, the full chorus (the blazingly well-trained London Symphony Chorus) sings a bitter passage with brittle timpani about Christ’s betrayer (“Judas, mercator pessimus, osculo petiit”, from Maundy Thursday Tenebrae). Likewise, in an early flashback, it declaims Christ’s Last Supper blessing of the bread and wine in the Vulgate version.
MacMillan also incorporates three modest stanzas of the hymn “Stabat mater dolorosa”; and, just before Jesus’s death, the choir alternates the Greek and Latin Hagios ischuros and Sanctus, fortis, in response to Christ’s reproaches from the cross, as in the traditional Roman rite for Good Friday.
This last choral section is one of the salient moments in this new Passion, in which dramatic outbursts, deeply rooted in MacMillan’s operatic experience — The Sacrifice, composed shortly before this Passion; the Spanish Inquisition opera Inés de Castro; and the liberation-theology stage piece Busquéda — come boldly to the fore. The use of retrospective referral — the Last Supper blessing, and Christ’s promise “Tu es Petrus” resurfacing as Peter denies Jesus — furnish further ingredients and allusions important to the musical structure also.
Serene in personality and wise in outlook, James MacMillan still appears an angry young man in his music. This is dangerous, perhaps; for it daubs on to this large canvas a relentless feel, however apt to the subject. Opportunities for quieter music and calm reflection offered themselves, but were strenuously, almost perversely, not taken.
Thus, at the outset, where MacMillan launches in with the arrest (Jesus was sung magnificently by the baritone Christopher Maltman) and the severing of the High Priest’s servant’s ear, blood flows almost from the start. By excising the meal and Christ’s agony in the garden, he embarks brutally quickly on the snarling dialectic and hurly-burly of the first trial scene.
The flaring full-chorus writing aside, one of the factors that works continuously in the composer’s favour is his use of a (here) 14-singer semi-chorus to deliver the narrative with almost crystalline purity — a device used by Arvo Pärt, among others, although MacMillan may owe a debt to other forerunners, such as Maxwell Davies’s Job. The onward flow of the music was helped immensely by these articulate performers, whose almost clinically lucid words kept the tragic unfolding of the story constantly on edge.
MacMillan’s orchestration, despite spurious or undue eruptions, is masterly. In the hands of Sir Colin Davis, whose 80th birthday the new work also celebrates, it emerged as passionate as, say, that of Davis’s other protégé, Sir Michael Tippett.
Wood-block percussion peppers some nasty, syncopated chorus writing. Paired flutes, in a lullingly Sibelian first section, and several splendid touches for clarinet and bass clarinet are also impressive, as is much searingly aggressive, Janácek-like writing for the caustic LSO brass, as Jesus faces down Annas and Caiaphas, and in the terrifying, almost cosmic violence that launches Part II — the crucifixion and the parting of the raiment, epitomised by chilling and sneering glissandi.
Yet, for all the musical gore and high drama, MacMillan presents a humble, chastened narrative: the fast-moving textual intercutting evokes for me the spirit not so much of Bach, or even Handel’s Brockes Passion, as the emotionally direct approach of Bach’s Dresden forerunner Schütz.
The orchestral strings (including a splendid violin solo at the close of the trial before Pilate) sustained quite long narrative passages moodily and yet reassuringly. Sir Colin assailed the music much as he galvanised BBC Proms audiences when he was a young lion in the 1960s.
Three salient late details particularly caught the imagination: the telling pianissimo final chorus “Christus factus est pro nobis obediens usque at mortem”, with that astonishing word “obediens”; several repeated, if truncated, direct allusions to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — opera’s ultimate evocation of passionate human love; and unearthly textures of low horns (no trombones), double bassoon, and divisi cellos in the Mahlerian orchestral postlude at the end, after Jesus gives up the ghost.
|
back to Arts
previous story
|
next story 
back to top
%231%23.gif "Wordl Vision Sponsor a child Nov to Dec campaign © site")