International Composer Festival with Sir James MacMillan

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.

MacMillan often draws inspiration from traditional Scottish music and culture, and the tone poem The Death of Oscar is based on one of the legends of the Celtic poet Ossian. These ancient stories have had a significant influence on the image of Scotland, inspiring composers such as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy when he wrote The Hebrides, and Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The trombone concerto oscillates between darkness and light, with dance-like episodes and meditative calm. At times, it is incredibly beautiful and poignant. MacMillan composed it in memory of his granddaughter Sara Maria MacMillan, who died at the young age of five from an incurable brain disease.

James MacMillan shares his strong Catholic faith with Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and both composers' music contains spiritually meditative elements. Messiaen's Les offrandes oubliées – The Forgotten Offerings – was his very first published orchestral piece. It is subtitled Méditation symphonique, symphonic meditation. This is music in which Messiaen gives us his own glimpse of eternity.

The Concerto for Orchestra, ”Ghosts”, is the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra's co-commissioned work for the festival. The piece was premiered a few months ago in London. The Guardian wrote about “a remarkably effective work” and noted its “energy and thrilling drama.” The title Ghosts is a reference to Beethoven's Ghost Trio, and because the music “seems to be haunted by other, earlier musical spirits and memories,” as MacMillan puts it.

Read our interview with James MacMillan (in Swedish)

Learn more about Chief Conductor Ryan Bancroft

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)

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.

MacMillan often draws inspiration from traditional Scottish music and culture, and the tone poem The Death of Oscar is based on one of the legends of the Celtic poet Ossian. These ancient stories have had a significant influence on the image of Scotland, inspiring composers such as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy when he wrote The Hebrides, and Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The trombone concerto oscillates between darkness and light, with dance-like episodes and meditative calm. At times, it is incredibly beautiful and poignant. MacMillan composed it in memory of his granddaughter Sara Maria MacMillan, who died at the young age of five from an incurable brain disease.

James MacMillan shares his strong Catholic faith with Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and both composers' music contains spiritually meditative elements. Messiaen's Les offrandes oubliées – The Forgotten Offerings – was his very first published orchestral piece. It is subtitled Méditation symphonique, symphonic meditation. This is music in which Messiaen gives us his own glimpse of eternity.

The Concerto for Orchestra, ”Ghosts”, is the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra's co-commissioned work for the festival. The piece was premiered a few months ago in London. The Guardian wrote about “a remarkably effective work” and noted its “energy and thrilling drama.” The title Ghosts is a reference to Beethoven's Ghost Trio, and because the music “seems to be haunted by other, earlier musical spirits and memories,” as MacMillan puts it.

Read our interview with James MacMillan (in Swedish)

Read more about chief conductor Ryan Bancroft

This year's International Composer Festival at Konserthuset Stockholm is dedicated to the Scottish composer James MacMillan. The spiritual is highly present in his emotional and powerful music, rooted in his Catholic faith. For him, musical experiences are a possible source of insights and contact with something fantastic, life-changing, and elevated.

Alongside his significant production of orchestral works and choral pieces, MacMillan also has a fantastic catalogue of chamber music. For brass quintet, we hear the evocative, sometimes darkly expressive Adam’s Rib, and Exsultet, where the quintet is augmented with percussion. The title Exsultet is taken from a hymn from the 4th century that proclaims Easter, and Kiss on Wood, in a version for cello and piano, is a peaceful meditation on Good Friday verses.

The cello sonata, with intermittently dance-like elements, consists of one movement but seven sections designed as a palindromic arch. MacMillan's music often connects to spirituality, faith, or literary writings from various times, but of his third string quartet, he says, "It's just notes and nothing else." Nevertheless, it is music that operates in the borderland between the physical and the ethereal, between sound and silence.

Read our interview with James MacMillan (in Swedish)