When it was accomplished in 1981, what’s now Christ Cathedral in Backyard Grove, California, was reportedly the biggest glass constructing on this planet. This was the venue for which James MacMillan wrote his 2020 choral work Fiat Lux. Its UK premiere, with MacMillan himself conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Refrain, was within the very completely different, subterranean setting of the Barbican Corridor.
It began with faint, glimmering breaths from the orchestra, introducing the 2 soloists, the soprano Mary Bevan and baritone Roderick Williams – he singing Latin, she English. With the horns tracing elemental rising figures, this opening part felt like Britten’s Canticles assembly Wagner’s Das Rheingold, a not sad prospect. Additional episodes turned in several instructions: the boys of the wonderful refrain intoning Latin in opposition to ornamental choral soprano strains; perky, cyclical dances on woodwind; an enormous organ chord of arrival, coming at us by way of loudspeakers within the absence of a suitably colossal instrument. The textual content appeared to evolve nearly organically from biblical phrases to Dana Gioia’s evocative poetry.
The half-hour rating culminated in an enormous wall of sound: on the premiere it will need to have felt as if these glass partitions would possibly shatter. Right here it was actually spectacular, however one felt the shortage of an inspiring venue: parts of repetition earlier within the work, which could have felt devotional and meditative in one other setting, had a tough time conjuring magic on this context.
Fiat Lux got here because the fruits of a thoughtfully put collectively programme exploring mild and loss. It started with the mesmerising descending scales of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten and continued with the work Britten wrote on the demise of his personal dad and mom, the Sinfonia da Requiem. MacMillan set regular tempos within the latter that emphasised the work’s mournful tread but made for low ranges of momentum.
Issues grew extra optimistic after the interval – first, MacMillan was offered with Fellowship of the Ivors Academy, becoming a member of a distinguished and eclectic roster that features Pierre Boulez and Kate Bush. Then, paving the best way for Fiat Lux on the finish, got here the teeming textures of Rautavaara’s Into the Coronary heart of Mild, a heat, barely bittersweet string piece filled with thickly woven, glowing harmonies. Each piece had an affect, and MacMillan held the big viewers silent to let each sink in.
