Today’s New Music scene is said to be pluralistic: everything is permitted; style is no longer a moral issue. But that supposedly ‘pluralistic’ scene is still full of people pursuing narrowly exclusive paths. Few composers have been brave enough to attempt a synthesis – Robin Holloway is one noble exception, and James MacMillan is another. Sometimes MacMillan’s style-contrasts do take on a moral/political dimension, as in Britannia, in which Celtic modality and folk-elements and a moment of radiant protest from his own Confession of Isobel Gowdie (Koch Schwann, 10/92 – a Gramophone Award winner) are submitted to crude onslaughts from drunken versions of Knees up Mother Brown, God save the Queen (particularly the line “send her victorious”) and a yobbishly strutting version of the first theme from Elgar’s Cockaigne, complete with off-beat duck-calls. The militaristic violence at the heart of Sinfonietta derives in part from an Ulster Loyalist song, The Sash. The message seems clear enough.
But, says MacMillan, the underlying “serious” purpose of Britannia is “to hold up a mirror to xenophobia” and the “negative, unsavoury brand of nationalism”, not to demonize the English per se. As an English listener I find it invigorating, rather than offensive. Anyway, MacMillan admits to a special liking for Gerontius, and his floating, ‘Celtic’ modalism carries a more than faint aroma of Vaughan Williams. That’s hardly surprising, for the aspect of MacMillan’s polystylism (hideous word) that makes it most appealing is surely its humane inclusiveness. MacMillan is a Catholic who can sympathize with the American Indian victims of Catholicism, a Scot who can make an entire piano concerto – The Berserking – out of the notion of “the Scots’ seeming facility for shooting themselves in the foot”. His folksiness is not without irony, even when – at the end of The Berserking – it can seem to offer a haven of peace after a great deal of ‘misdirected’ energy. MacMillan’s sense of individuality grew as he turned his back on academic modernism, yet he can find inspiration in Birtwistle and the later Messiaen as well as Vaughan Williams and The Chieftains.
Charles Ives is clearly one of MacMillan’s synthesizer-heroes. In fact there are moments in Britannia that actually sound like Ives, with something too of the American composer’s robust delight in musical oil-and-vinegar mixes. That’s one of the reasons why, for all his devout intentions, MacMillan never degenerates into the invention-starved mood-manipulation of the so-called Holy Minimalists. At the same time, each of these pieces tells its story with a directness and warm empathy that may remind the listener of Mahler or Tchaikovsky. I actually find MacMillan least absorbing when he is at his most apparently single-minded, as in the hocketting-dominated Sowetan Spring – an impressive technical exercise but perhaps focused a little too narrowly. It is strikingly well performed though, as are all the other works on this disc, and beautifully recorded too – few young composers are so lucky. Well, MacMillan deserves it, and if you want to find out why, I can’t think of a better introduction to his music.'