I've waited some time before writing anything about these two discs because
I didn't want to let my well-known enthusiasm for MacMillan's music
overwhelm any more considered response to the three pieces:

The World's Ransoming (a concertante piece for cor anglais and orchestra)
- BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra cond.  Osmo Vanska, Christine Pendrill
(the LSO's specialist) - cor anglais.

Cello Concerto - BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra cond.  Osmo Vanska,
Raphael Wallfisch - cello.

Symphony "Vigil" - BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra cond. Osmo Vanska.

The first two of these are on BIS-CD-989 (60mins), the third is on
BIS-CD-990 (48mins).  They sell in the UK at the lower end of the
full-price range, and I got mine from Tower at a generous discount for
buying the two together.

I shall make little attempt to describe the music, as that task is beyond
my powers. But I hope I may be able to persuade some others to listen to it.

The World's Ransoming is a single-movement piece that combines a long and
sinuous lament for cor anglais with familiar MacMillan devices - use of
plainchant, heavy but always inventive and effective percussion writing,
fanfare-like outbursts from the brass.  As with much of MacMillan some of
the music can seem brash and aggressive at first, but given a few hearings
and increasing familarity with his sound-world, it becomes more lyrical and
you start to hear "inside" the surface.  I heard Christine Pendrill perform
this piece live on an LSO tour a few years ago - I was very struck by it
then and it gets better with repeated listening.  It's a major addition to
the cor anglais repertoire and a fine piece in itself - but it only really
comes into its own when heard as the first part of the Easter trilogy.
Elements of "The World's Ransoming" recur in the other two pieces, and they
form part of the glue that binds all three pieces into something that is
perhaps not one great three-part mega-symphony, but definitely more than
three separate parts.

MacMillan usually gives his pieces names, but the cello concerto hasn't
got one.  Instead, its three movements are called "The Mockery", "The
Reproaches", and "Dearest Wood and Dearest Iron" - the clearest possible
references to the events of Christ's Passion.  MacMillan is a devout
Catholic and his faith infuses much of his work (and it is something which
I do not share, nor - as I understand it - does Osmo Vanska).  He wrote the
Cello Concerto just after finishing his opera "Ines de Castro".  That is
one of his least (overtly) Christian or Catholic pieces, but at its core
is the sacrifice of the lives of innocents, and the idea of redemption -
so there are connections.  It contains a scene in which an executioner
describes the torture and death of a murderer in graphic detail, and
MacMillan has said that he agonised at length over that scene and had
nightmares for months about it.  The Cello Concerto is in part a reworking
of music from that scene and other parts of the opera, so although I had
somehow managed to avoid any opportunity to hear the Cello Concerto before
buying the recording, much of the music was familiar from knowing the
opera.  One might expect the concerto to contain some plainchant, but this
time MacMillan avoids that.  Instead, he quotes from a Presbyterian hymn,
"Dunblane Cathedral".  While he was composing this concerto, the gunman
Thomas Hamilton entered a primary school in Dunblane and slaughtered
sixteen five-year-old children and their teacher in the school gym before
taking his own life in some kind of revenge against the community he had
lived in for everything that had gone wrong in his own life.  The death of
innocents, again - and, perhaps, of innocence.  I was living in Scotland at
the time, not all that far from Dunblane.  It's impossible to rank an event
like that against others like the recent high-school massacre in America,
but it will be a long time before I can hear any reference to Dunblane
without being transported back to the agony and emptiness of that day.
So, the emotional content of MacMillan's Cello Concerto is very deep and
very complex.  Typically for MacMillan, who is as much a socialist as a
Catholic, it binds his view of Christ's suffering to the harshest of social
realities.  And it hurts.  David Kettle's review in the BBC Music Magazine
calls it "often anguished music" and so it is, but that is only one
dimension.  The more I listen to it, the more that description seems
inadequate.

When I heard the LSO perform "Vigil" in London in late 1997, I felt it
didn't hang together very well.  It contained some fascinating passages,
but it seemed to be a collection of MacMillan cliches without any central
thrust to focus them all.  I thought it was a piece that should have been
allowed a few more years to mature, and that it was perhaps his least
successful large-scale piece (with a possible exception for the trumpet
concerto "Epiclesis", which I have yet to learn to love).  Living with the
recording for a few weeks, and repeatedly hearing "Vigil" in the context
of the other parts of Triduum, has led me to turn that view on its head.
"Vigil" is stunning.  It is a "darkness into light" piece in three
movements - "Light" (which is uncompromisingly dark, with no violins),
"Tuba insonet salutaris" and "Water".  Much of the musical material is
derived from the first two panels of this Easter triptych and it is
transformed into a celebration of life and hope.  And something more.

MacMillan has not proved to be an easy composer to record successfully,
and several of his earlier recordings have not done justice to his music (a
very honourable exception here for the Naxos CD of the percussion concerto,
a partial one for Peter Donohoe's recording of the piano concerto "The
Berserking" and another for BMG's "Seven Last Words") These BIS recordings
are, I believe, BBC tapes from Radio 3 broadcasts.  The sound is very good
(the aural perspectives on "Vigil" are very different from those I remember
from my seat in the Barbican, but none the worse for that), the ochestra is
up to the job, the soloists are excellent and Vanska clearly has a deep
understanding of how MacMillan's music works.  I have no idea how BIS and
the BBC and BMG sorted out all the contractual and copyright issues etc.
between themselves but I'm delighted they did.  Perhaps it might encourage
the BBC to be more willing to put other broadcasts out on CD themselves.
We can only hope . . .

Ian Crisp
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