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Friday, December 25, 2020

James MacMillan - Seven Last Words from the Cross (Graham Ross)


Information

Composer: James MacMillan
  • (01) Seven Last Words from the Cross
  • (08) Christus Vincit
  • (09) Nemo te condemnavit
  • (10) ... here is hiding...

The Dmitri Ensemble
Graham Ross, conductor

Date: 2020
Label: Naxos

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Review

An exceptional performance of MacMillan’s masterpiece

Commissioned by the BBC in 1993 and first broadcast on television during Easter week of the following year, Seven Last Words from the Cross is one of James MacMillan’s most enduring achievements, a work to which I have found myself returning more than almost any other in hs extensive output. It’s a grippingly intense and enviably concentrated setting for double choir and string orchestra of Jesus’s final utterances combined with texts from other liturgical sources (most notably the Good Friday Responsaries for Tenebrae). Inspiration runs consistently high in this nourishing cantata, not least at the start of the second movement where three times the choir arrestingly cries “Woman, Behold, Thy Son!” (the tension in the silence between the phrases is mesmeric), the third movement’s spellbindingly beautiful treatment of the Good Friday versicle Ecce lignum Crucis, those jagged string chords which launch the sixth movement (“It is finished”) or, perhaps above all, the achingly expressive Scottish lament that is the orchestral postlude, the string-writing bearing MacMillan’s hallmark “keening” style (Jesus’s dying breaths are quite extraordinarily moving).

This is the work’s third recording – following on from those under the composer himself (Catalyst, 5/95 – nla) and Stephen Layton (Hyperion, 9/05) – and, on balance, the most compelling and inexorable-sounding yet. Graham Ross secures outstandingly fervent and finely disciplined results from the youthful Dmitri Ensemble (of which he is both co-founder and principal conductor), while the remaining three items are just as impressive, especially the radiantly soaring anthem for double choir Christus vincit (written in 1994 for St Paul’s Cathedral, London).

Plaudits must also go to John Rutter, who is credited with the triple role of producer, engineer and editor: technically speaking the disc is little short of a triumph in its combination of truthful sonority and wholly natural perspective. Richly rewarding listening, all of it, and a classy 50th-birthday tribute to MacMillan.

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone


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James MacMillan (born 16 July 1959) is a Scottish classical composer and conductor. He studied composition at the University of Edinburgh with Rita McAllister and Kenneth Leighton, and at Durham University with John Casken. MacMillan came to the attention of the classical establishment with the BBC Scottish SO's premiere of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the Proms in 1990. Further successes have included his second opera The Sacrifice and the St John Passion. MacMillan's music is infused with the spiritual and the political. His Roman Catholic faith has inspired many of his sacred works.

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Graham Ross (born 29 April 1985) is a British conductor and composer. He studied composition with Giles Swayne at Clare College, Cambridge, and conducting with Peter Stark and Robin O'Neill at London's Royal College of Music. In 2004 he co-founded The Dmitri Ensemble, a performing group based around a string ensemble, of which he is Principal Conductor. Since 2010, Ross has directed the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, with whom he has toured across Europe, the United States of America, Asia and Australia. As a composer, Ross has written over one hundred works for a wide variety of genres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Ross_(musician)
http://www.grahamross.com/

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