International Composer Festival – Drama with three notes

This year's International Composer Festival at Konserthuset Stockholm is dedicated to the Scottish composer James MacMillan. His music combines raw emotional power with spiritual focus, rooted in his Catholic faith.

The concert begins with an overture: Eleven. Music with a sports theme, inspired by the local football teams in East Ayrshire, Scotland, where MacMillan grew up. Eleven refers to the number of players in a team, and much of the music is built around the number eleven. The piece starts with the sound of a referee's whistle, and familiar melodies from football chants also emerge.

At the heart of the expressive second violin concerto is a simple theme with just three notes played pizzicato at the beginning. As often in MacMillan's music, there are dance-like elements, but also melancholic passages that can suddenly burst open and let in light, like clearings in a dark forest. The soloist is the acclaimed Swedish violinist Ava Bahari.

In the short piece One for chamber orchestra, the atmosphere is idyllic with simple folk music-inspired melodies. Tryst has strong elements of Scottish folk music, but also of other music that has been important to him. "Tryst" can refer to a secret meeting place for lovers, but farmers in Scotland often use the word to describe a place where animals gather, a "trysting place". Here, MacMillan uses Tryst to describe a meeting place for music that is dear to him.

The Swedish Chamber Orchestra performs under the direction of Brett Dean, who himself was the subject of the International Composer Festival at Konserthuset in 2011, but is also internationally active as a conductor.

Read our interview with James MacMillan (in Swedish)