MacMillan: The Confession of Isobel Gowdie & Symphony No. 3

Album review

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 symphony. Its expressionistic and sometimes aggressive material produces dramatic tension and some propulsion, but the lack of a clear trajectory or tight developmental structure makes this work seem meandering and abstruse. The BBC Philharmonic, conducted by the composer, is gorgeous in its sonorities and textures, but the extremely subdued sound quality obscures many fine details.

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