The UK premiere of James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio at the Royal Festival Hall – originally scheduled for 2020 – was worth waiting for, writes Alexandra Coghlan

The UK premiere of James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio at the Royal Festival Hall – originally scheduled for 2020 – was worth waiting for, writes Alexandra Coghlan

Advent is a time of anticipation, so it seems fitting that we had to wait a whole year for Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio to have its UK premiere.

Originally scheduled for 2020, the two-hour work for soloists, chorus and large orchestra – one of the Scottish composer’s most ambitious and largest-scale pieces to date – was derailed by Covid. A radio broadcast in January from Amsterdam supplied a tantalising stopgap, but this month – at long last – the oratorio finally arrived at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

And what an arrival it was (4 December, Royal Festival Hall). There aren’t many living composers who could command a prime, Saturday night slot and a full hall for a new work, especially in December. That MacMillan can says everything about a musician who has found a language spanning the gulf that seems to have opened up between composer and audience in the contemporary concert hall. Direct without being facile, approachable without ever feeling patronising, rooted in the past without reactionary pastiche, MacMillan’s music does a difficult thing, and makes it sound absolutely and instinctively natural.

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