James MacMillan’s St Luke Passion is the second of four planned works, one based on each gospel, that aim to approach the differing passion narratives from contrasting stylistic perspectives. The big, controversial St John Passion was first heard in 2008 and an intimate setting of St Mark is in the offing. The St Luke Passion, its scale somewhere between the two, was first performed in Amsterdam last year, and was heard in Birmingham and Cambridge before being given its London premiere by the Britten Sinfonia. MacMillan himself conducted.
The work’s principal reference point is Bach, whose chorale O Haupt Voll Blut und Wunden emerges in the orchestra during the angry postlude to the crucifixion. But its presence throws up differences rather than similarities: where Bach’s passions draw the listener into a private confrontation with mortality that can transcend individual belief, MacMillan is exactingly theological.
The passion story is contextualised by a prelude dealing with the annunciation and a postlude that depicts the ascension and glances towards the second coming. Jesus’s words are sung by a three-part children’s choir as a reflection of Christ’s otherness and God’s trinitarian nature, while an adult chorus assumes the roles of evangelist and persecutors in music that sometimes attains a pitch of uncompromising brutality.
Its formidable challenges were superbly met, with London’s Trinity Boys Choir and the Schola Cantorum of the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School sounding serenely otherworldly, and the Britten Sinfonia Voices tackling everything from intricate polyphony to truly terrifying cries of “Crucify him!” But there is an unvarying quality to it all that doesn’t quite sustain the work’s 80-minute span, while its innate didacticism keeps us at arm’s length from any sense of individual suffering. It impresses, but doesn’t always move.
