The emergence at the start of the 1990s of James MacMillan as a notable creative figure gave a timely boost to the Scottish composers following in his wake. Not that Stuart MacRae could be said to have emulated him even obliquely: witness the impact that his first important piece Landscape and the Mind: Distance, Refuge (1997) made at its first performance, its technical finesse and distinctive take on post-war modernism indicative of someone from whom much could be expected in the 21st century – an expectation which, nearly three decades on, has indeed been fulfilled.

Music for larger ensembles or for orchestra dominated those earlier years of MacRae’s maturity. Chief among them is the Violin Concerto (2001), which received its premiere at the BBC Proms with Tasmin Little. This is not so much an ‘anti-concerto’ as one which, in its overall subtlety and understatement, is written against the Romantic archetype. Hence the Lutosławskian rhythmic gestures of the preludial Giusto and spare textures of a Largo e mesto that plays out with a discrete gravity recalling late Stravinsky. A brief Animoso absorbs the soloist into a chamber-like discourse that dissolves into textures verging on the pointillist, while the following Malinconico achieves its cumulative impact via finely judged polyrhythmic interplay. The expressive brass gestures towards the climax of this final movement hint at a Bergian catharsis before the soloist retreats musingly into silence.

MacRae followed this up with a very different if no less arresting concertante work for cello, Hamartia (2003), alluding to Greek tragedy with its emphasis on that ‘tragic flaw’ found in all heroes. Vocal music was also forthcoming. One piece that warrants revival is Ancrene wisse (‘Guide for Anchoresses’, 2002), an extended setting of Middle English texts in which soprano and female chorus are absorbed into an orchestral texture, duly articulating what can hardly be conveyed by words alone. Most substantial is Gaudete (2008) – a scena for soprano and orchestra which sets extracts from one of Ted Hughes’s most densely allusive collections: one that revolves around the necessarily oblique relationship of humankind both to God and to nature, though the composer’s perspective seems clear from an epilogue of great subtlety and evocative beauty.

The last two works emerged either side of MacRae’s first foray into opera. With its libretto by Simon Armitage after James George Frazer’s rendering of the legend of the goddess Diana, the chamber opera The Assassin Tree (2006) offers a stark but highly expressive take on the ‘death and renewal’ concept, drawing directly and unaffectedly on Britten’s church parables and Maxwell Davies’s music theatre, thus signalling a vibrant new approach to the melding of music and drama which its composer was keen to develop further. This was soon achieved by his ‘music for dance’ Echo and Narcissus (2006), the short chamber opera Remembrance Day (2008) and Ghost Patrol (2011) – a tense trio-drama with an ‘imaginary’ wartime setting. The last two works both feature librettos by Louise Welsh, the novelist and playwright with whom MacRae has regularly collaborated.

With The Devil Inside (2015), one of the most significant British chamber operas of recent decades, MacRae created a work comparable to Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek or Thomas Adès’s Powder her Face. It draws on a late short story by Robert Louis Stevenson whose setting is updated to an unerringly contemporary ambience of aspiring individuals both attracted and repelled by the trappings of ‘late capitalism’ – the mundanity of the work’s environs enhancing the otherness of its message. The music, meanwhile, displays all the hallmarks of MacRae’s lucid and perceptive take on post-war dramaturgy, an acute theatrical intensity going hand in hand with musical immediacy to ensure the work’s underlying conviction. This is manifestly an opera that belongs in the select repertoire of the past half-century.

MacRae had not been neglecting smaller-scale works during this period, and these frequently exude no less emotional impact than his larger projects. One such is Ixion (2014), for clarinet, cello and piano, which represents the unfortunate Greek mythological figure through a sequence of eight ‘moments’ whose motifs combine and evolve without any underlying progress, like the motion of an endlessly – indeed, mindlessly – rotating wheel. Another is Ursa minor (2020), for flute, clarinet, piano, violin and cello, in which the music evokes that constellation via a gradually accruing change that is implied more than actually stated.

Two vocal works of this period are especially impressive in terms of the imaginative response to their subject matter. Parable (2013) is a stark setting for baritone and ensemble of Wilfred Owen’s poem. It is markedly different from the one by Britten in the War Requiem, not least in the way that MacRae’s vocal line threads its way through an ensemble whose diversity of gestures affords a graphic evocation of the biblical story and the poet’s distortion of it – the outcome of which can only be total collapse into mindless repetition. I Am Prometheus (2018), for tenor and ensemble, employs MacRae’s own text to evoke the Titan invested with aspects of both man and god who endures a punishment meted out for what is aptly described by MacRae as his ‘exceptionalism’. From the anger of captivity to the hopelessness of solitude, its overall trajectory is as arresting as it is inevitable.

MacRae’s latest opera is his longest and most ambitious thus far. Focusing on a team of Arctic scientists whose unexpected discovery challenges any previously held belief concerning life and death, Anthropocene (2018) is demonstrably a drama for an era beset by – if at the same time often in denial of – climate change; a work that poses fundamental questions concerning exploration and the acquisition of knowledge. This is arguably the opera that captures most completely the spirit of its age.

Other recent pieces reflect a productive collaboration with the Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and the Australian–Scottish violin–cello duo Sequoia. These artists, plus MacRae himself on the harmonium, are heard in The Captive (2021–22, on the album ‘Earth, thy Cold Is Keen’), whose wordless Prologue and Epilogue frame an unaccompanied setting of Emily Brontë, whose writing confirms a new imaginative freedom. Equally involving is the song-cycle Kingdoms (2022), a setting of poems by Chinwe D. John on issues global and personal, with music that denotes the consistency of MacRae’s idiom whatever stylistic changes may have taken place.

There are at least two other pieces that deserve to be commercially recorded. Coming 18 years after the combative duality of his First Piano Sonata (1998), MacRae’s Second (2016) is no less provocative for its relative equivocation – the four movements complement each other to an intriguing degree. Meanwhile, the Prometheus Symphony (2019), for soprano, baritone and chamber orchestra, continues a fascination with myth – its consequences and its lessons. Structured as a diptych, it draws on texts by Aeschylus, Goethe and MacRae himself, with the vocal soloists heard in the context of orchestral writing whose tonal fluidity is a likely pointer towards where its composer might be heading.

Just completed is a song-cycle based on Stevenson poems for tenor Glen Cunningham, which is being released commercially near the start of 2025. Meanwhile, MacRae and Welsh are planning an opera based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the ‘Scottish play’ that has resonances for all times. No doubt, too, it will be equally indicative of a personal and always evolving idiom that reaffirms MacRae’s status as one of the leading European composers of his generation.

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today