James MacMillan's Christmas Oratorio, review: a major contribution to the religious repertory

Premiered in Amsterdam in January this year, without an audience but broadcast on radio, James MacMillan’s big new choral and orchestral work was widely welcomed as one of the most important products of lockdown, a supremely optimistic statement at a time of great uncertainty. Finally arriving at the Festival Hall on Saturday, delivered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra who had co-commissioned it, the performance had the one ingredient that premiere lacked: an engaged and attentive audience, resulting in a standing ovation which confirmed its stature as a major contribution to the religious repertory.

MacMillan has always been a strongly committed Roman Catholic, and this element of his music has come to predominate, as the hard-hitting orchestral scores such as The Confession of Isobel Gowdie and The Berserking, which made his name three decades ago, have given way to a series of substantial quasi-liturgical tableaux including the Tenebrae Responsories and the St John and St Luke Passions.

Now he has turned to Christmas, choosing a title that (like the Passions) inevitably recalls Bach. But what divides MacMillan from Bach is more interesting than what unites them: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio consists of six separate cantatas for different days, driven by narrative and meditation; MacMillan’s is a pair of symmetrical arcs, each placing choruses, arias and orchestral movements around a central tableau. This rather echoes Bach’s planning of the second part of the St John Passion, and helps the clarity and momentum of each half.

MacMillan does not make things easy for himself by giving the narrative elements to the chorus, who declaim sometimes in block chords, sometimes in unison, the story of the birth of Christ. There are echoes of plainsong, but it is the framing of the piece with folksong that makes the strongest impression, the first orchestral Sinfonia emerging from half-heard melodies, and the last chorus setting a Gaelic carol (with a hint of John Tavener in its Alleluias), before the final Sinfonia winds down the whole work with the unearthly chiming of the celeste.

Most successful in every respect is the last chorus of the first part, Hodie Christus natus est, emerging from galumphing double basses to become a choral dance with an ethereal solo violin (Pieter Schoeman) that lifts the spirits. The ever-eclectic sources of MacMillan’s inspiration are here drawn from the British oratorio tradition, from bombastic punctuations and declamation that seem to have strayed from Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, via rapidly scuttering strings from Tippett, to echoes of Britten, whose combination of liturgical Latin texts and contemporary poetry in his War Requiem is inevitably recalled. MacMillan’s solo arias, wide-ranging and emotionally aspirational, set poetry by Donne, Milton and Robert Southwell’s ‘Behold a silly tender babe’. Superbly delivered by soprano Lucy Crowe at the top of her register and baritone Roderick Williams in warmly communicative mode, they reveal a side of the composer that just stays on the right side of the sentimental.

In the end the oratorio has a remarkably gentle and profoundly spiritual aspect, to which the audience readily responded. Conductor Mark Elder is the master of marshalling such diverse forces, and this was a wholly confident and well-prepared London premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. Macmillan’s Christmas Oratorio is a work which enhances the oratorio tradition; I am sure it will offer a welcome if strenuous challenge for many choirs and orchestras.