Inspired by his Catholic faith, James MacMillan often composes intense works on religious themes. Yet unlike his older contemporaries, Sir John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, whose calm meditations and ecstatic paeans reflect their composers' certitude in Christian redemption, MacMillan frequently considers darker subjects and creates a dramatic tension in his music between expressions of suffering and salvation. His setting for choir and string orchestra of the Seven Last Words from the Cross (1993) is the harshest and most ...
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Inspired by his Catholic faith, James MacMillan often composes intense works on religious themes. Yet unlike his older contemporaries, Sir John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, whose calm meditations and ecstatic paeans reflect their composers' certitude in Christian redemption, MacMillan frequently considers darker subjects and creates a dramatic tension in his music between expressions of suffering and salvation. His setting for choir and string orchestra of the Seven Last Words from the Cross (1993) is the harshest and most disturbing composition on this 2005 Hyperion release, and the severe portrayal of Jesus' agony is much stronger than the pathos that is usually emphasized in such Good Friday services. Stark polytonality, dissonant counterpoint, dense clusters, and abrasive effects in the strings contribute to the vivid depiction of the Passion; and the choral writing is often tightly chromatic and harmonically unstable, at times in direct conflict with passages of straightforward tonality and open...
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