James MacMillan Christmas Oratorio Lucy Crowe (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone); London Philharmonic Choir & Orchestra/Mark Elder LPO LPO-0125 94:10 mins (2 discs)
When James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio had its UK premiere at the Royal Festival Hall a year ago, critical reaction was overwhelmingly positive. This recording of the event confirms the Oratorio as one of MacMillan’s finest ever pieces.
It benefits from a wonderfully committed team of performers, including soprano Lucy Crowe and baritone Roderick Williams, who get an aria in each of the Oratorio’s two palindromically-shaped sections. Crowe is impassioned in her Part 1 aria, if strained by its higher reaches, while Williams’s immaculate diction etches contour and meaning into MacMillan’s extended setting of lines from Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. Crowe and Williams also feature in the two choral Tableaus which are central pillars of the Oratorio’s structure. Tableau 1 tracks Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents in music of increasing fraughtness and ferocity, the tension built electrically by Elder and a fired-up London Philharmonic Choir.
MacMillan’s score is peppered with original ideas and surprises – a twinkling celesta in the opening Sinfonia, a solo violin spinning a jig in Part 1’s concluding chorus, the wondrously swirling, diaphanous textures conjured in the opening chorus of Part 2, and the carolling of solo instruments at the work’s conclusion. The performance overall has some of the scrappiness associated with live recording, but this is significantly outweighed by the immediacy of real, in-the-moment music-making. The spiritual charge of MacMillan’s Oratorio is made palpable, its heady mix of wonder, trepidation and profound mystery stirringly captured.
Terry Blain