It’s a brave thing, to compose a Christmas Oratorio when you’re not Bach: the comparisons between his genius and yours are likely to be awkward, and not many in the course of music history have been prepared to risk it. Saint-Saëns tried – congratulations are in order if you’ve heard the piece, it’s rarely done. And in the 1940s Britten toyed with the idea, but reconsidered when the text produced by Auden for the purpose turned out to be inappropriate.

But last month saw the UK premiere of a Christmas Oratorio by James MacMillan. Like the coming of the Saviour it addressed, the piece was long-expected: it had been delayed by Covid. A good turnout at the Festival Hall indicated the significance of the event. And what we heard – from the LPO and Chorus under Mark Elder, with soloists Lucy Crowe and Roderick Williams – was astonishing, not least for the sheer courage with which MacMillan approached a hard task.

Apart from certain formalities of organisation, it had little in common with Bach, its models closer to the kind of eclectic compendium pieces you associate with Britten – using texts that were part-Biblical, part-liturgical, part-poetic, mixing Latin and English. And its music had an almost brash immediacy that managed to be easy on the ear as well as hold the audience throughout.

But most impressive was the way MacMillan seemed completely unafraid to do things that, in less assured hands, could have sounded tackily naive. His starting point was that the Christmas story is a thing of wonder that demands of us a certain innocence in our response. The whole score opens with a hesitantly spangled little dance, like something from a music box that, to my mind, suggests a small child peering shyly through a theatre curtain at the prospect of some unknown drama: maybe happy, maybe not. And when the chorus breaks in with the Radiant Dawn text from the Christmas antiphons, asking for light “on those who dwell in darkness”, it shifts suddenly into a section of the Credo – signalling that this is faith-full music, allied to a narrative of the Nativity that has to be approached with disbelief suspended.

As always, MacMillan writes from a Catholic perspective, and it runs deep in this piece which tells the Christmas story twice over: as events, and then as mystery. MacMillan’s line on mystery isn’t far removed from that of Messiaen. It comes with ecstasy, abandon, sometimes questionable taste. It doesn’t flinch from Cecil B DeMille effects. And I would say he gets away with it – except that might suggest a near miss, which this Christmas Oratorio is not. MacMillan gets away with it because he knows what he’s doing, believes in what he’s doing, and has the compositional technique to support his intentions, all of which is completely persuasive, and never more so than in the melting beauty of a Scottish lullaby that comes as a surprise choral pay-off at the end. It has the makings of a Classic FM earworm, and why not? Contemporary music has allowed the devil good tunes for too long. It’s time they got reclaimed. 

It’s a happy coincidence that Benjamin Britten shared his birthday with the feast of St Cecilia, patron saint of music. And his hometown of Aldeburgh usually organises a commemorative weekend around that time of year, which gives visiting music-lovers an experience of the Suffolk coast in all its autumn glory: windswept, cold, a touch bleak but still beautiful.

Snape Maltings, where the Britten weekend largely happens, ranks among the most magnificently sited concert venues in the world, presiding over the vast flatlands of the River Alde. And it’s a place of pilgrimage for devotees (like me) of Britten’s work – with a uniquely bright, strong, almost reinforced acoustic. Put a chamber orchestra onstage there and it sounds symphonic. So when the conductor John Wilson brought in his full-sized, supercharged Sinfonia of London (a new ensemble using seriously good players) for the weekend, the dimension of the sound was mind-blowing: if anything, too much for the Britten Piano Concerto they performed with Pavel Kolesnikov as soloist. It turned a piece that’s agile, wiry, young-man’s music into something grandly technicolour – which was not how I’d invariably want to hear it, but impressive. As was the poetic grandeur of Kolesnikov, a pianist whose intensity is thrilling.

Everything on the Sinfonia’s programme over two days came with comparable dynamism: Britten’s Nocturne (soloist Ian Bostridge), and a raft of other English works, including a juggernaut performance of Vaughan Williams’ A London Symphony. VW maintained a Blake-like view of London: it was spiritual, mystical (though not uncritical) and it informs this piece, which represents how somebody who lived there (as Vaughan Williams did during the first half of the 20th century) might feel about the city. In John Wilson’s hands the city morphed into Las Vegas; but that was a price worth paying, almost, for the energy. Here was a gas-lamp piece, electrified: audacious and incredibly exciting. 

This article first appeared in the January 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.

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