Seven Last Words, Edinburgh, review: 'profound spiritual power'

The SCO Chorus and Strings delivered a compelling, immediate performance of Sir James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words, writes David Kettle

Of all Sir James MacMillan’s often deeply emotive music, his1993 Seven Last Words must count among his most viscerally powerful pieces – a sometimes raw, sometimes exquisitely beautiful reflection on the dying Christ’s final utterances on the Cross, from neo-Baroque radiance to muttering, chanting vocal urgency, and a concluding nod to MacMillan’s own Scottish heritage. It’s a profoundly religious work, of course, but it also offers plenty for non-believers in its unflinching depictions of sufferings, endings and rebirth. The SCO Chorus and SCO Strings’ searing account in Edinburgh’s Greyfrairs Kirk was fittingly scheduled for the eve of Holy Week, as also a time when warm weather and cherry blossom in the graveyard spoke of spring’s sense of renewal.

And there was plenty in conductor (and SCO Chorus Director) Gregory Batsleer’s vivid, deftly paced account that leant into dramatic urgency more than religious piety – the brutal, stinging string chords in the penultimate “It is finished”, for example, or the shuddering tremolos in the austere earlier “I thirst”. That movement proved a showcase for the SCO Chorus’s famed textual clarity – they rolled those two words’ phonemes rounds in their mouths to unsettlingly pronounced effect – while the opening “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” was a masterclass in teasing apart the ever-changing strands in MacMillan’s sometimes bewilderingly rich textures. It was a compelling, immediate performance – apart from a strangely thrown-away ending to the atmospheric “I thirst” – but whose inexorable build-ups and shattering climaxes Batsleer navigated expertly.

His opener, Byrd’s equally despairing ‘Ne irascaris, Domine’, contrasted the SCO Chorus’s velvety richness with the brutality of the text, while Daniel Kidane’s luminous Be Still drew quiet magic from interlacing tremolo harmonies, delivered with glistening precision by the SCO Strings. Such was the reverential feeling that applause was withheld until the concert’s end – a fittingly restrained response to an evening of such profound spiritual power.