Religious matters underlie James MacMillan's works on this 2005 Chandos release, and to greater or lesser extents, the composer has created orchestral requiems that may provoke thoughts of human suffering and final things. The Confession of Isabel Gowdie (1990) draws on the 1662 witchcraft trial of a Scottish woman; in MacMillan's account, she represents the thousands of innocents executed during the Reformation. MacMillan's score is mostly elegiac, though the slow passages in the Lydian mode are interrupted by sections of ...
Read More
Religious matters underlie James MacMillan's works on this 2005 Chandos release, and to greater or lesser extents, the composer has created orchestral requiems that may provoke thoughts of human suffering and final things. The Confession of Isabel Gowdie (1990) draws on the 1662 witchcraft trial of a Scottish woman; in MacMillan's account, she represents the thousands of innocents executed during the Reformation. MacMillan's score is mostly elegiac, though the slow passages in the Lydian mode are interrupted by sections of extremely violent music. Programmatically, Confession's narrative is almost simplistic, but effective in its directness. In his Symphony No. 3, "Silence" (2002), inspired by a novel by Shusaku Endo and dedicated to the author's memory, MacMillan wrestles with the problem of pain and God's apparent indifference to genocide. Without knowing MacMillan's literary references or his theological stance, one might regard this single-movement work as more of a brooding tone poem than a proper...
Read Less
