Last Night’s Premiere
(photo by Michael J. Lutch of the Boston Globe. Copyright 2010)
The MacMillan St. John Passion has officially premiered in the United States and people are talking. As a musician, I’ve sung a lot of Passions and realize that these are by-definition meant to impact and inspire reflection. Mr. MacMillan’s, to me, is a powerful example of this.
Jeremy Eichler’s Boston Globe review is predictable enough. MacMillan’s Passion is a modern and varied piece — maybe even with elements of Schoenberg or Britten in its midst — but he seems to have missed the point of looking at the piece for what the composer intended rather than forming an opinion on what Eichler (and perhaps others) may have wanted it to be.
My own thoughts about this work are that — like most Passions — MacMillan’s version isn’t for everyone: the 12-tone music, bombastic orchestral interludes and high drama make an already volatile text come alive. I was even taken aback at the difficulty of the score early in the rehearsal process and struggled to understand how the text corresponded with the music, with or without our BSO-issued study recording. However, over the course of a few months, I’ve come to understand and even appreciate MacMillan’s work.
What can be said about last night’s (and, I hope, tonight and tomorrow’s) performance is that it was energetic. From fourth row of the chorus I was able to get a pretty good picture of the efforts onstage and the audience’s reactions: At the end of the ninth movement I saw faces rapt in the silence, at attention with all of us onstage.
