This CD contains the final part of James Macmillan's `Easter Triduum'. This is comprised of The World's Ransoming - a 21 minutes Cor Anglais and Orchestra Work., a 40 minute three movement Cello Concerto and this 48 minute three movement Symphony `Vigil'. Together they are really one huge seven movement 109 minute long symphony in which the thematic material introduced in the first two works or parts is developed and re-expressed in this symphony.

I recommend that you begin by listening to the first CD of `The World's Ransoming' and the Cello Concerto.

The three works take the listener through the four days between Jesus last meal with his disciples and resurrection on Easter morning.

Easter celebrations centre on The Last Supper, Jesus' death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. The Saturday: Jesus' time in the tomb gets left out. There isn't much to say about the quiet of a tomb, is there? Macmillan thinks that there is. He gives expression to the weight of death by expressing the profound activity needed to lift someone out of it's darkness and immobility. The first two movements of the symphony are about this. The first: `Light', is a nine minute stirring, a nine minute slow penetration of light into the recesses of the tomb, reawakening the possibility of life. The second movement is called `Tuba insonet salutaris' `Sound the trumpet of salvation'. Now that life has been stirred it can be called forth. The trumpet sounds, and all sorts of themes from the preceding parts of the Triduum are awakened. There is a question. What will be reborn? Will the corpse be reanimated only to be placed back in its death agonies? Surely not! Instead, as the trumpet sounds (on the deeper brass - because deep work is being undertaken) the agonies of death, having been stirred, are one by one put to death, so that when the body does rise.....

.......there is a wondrous explosion into life! The final movement begins with high mysterious glissando on the strings. A pure sound, pain and it's causes now gone. Then something like an underground waterfall pours forth, which becomes a river of emerging life - which explodes into glorious percussive abandon - life unfettered and free - before dwindling to slowly into silence - not of death but of expectancy - what is this new life like?

This is an excellent CD which gets deep inside the intentions of the composer. Macmillan's music resists being placed on a spectrum between easy and difficult. My take on Macmillan is that he is a modernist, but one who places sufficient musical signposts in his works so that the average classical music listener can find their way around. He is the opposite of a `Holy Minimalist' like Tavener or Part, he loves richness, complexity and battles that end in the reconciliation of seeming opposites. His music is not time out from the struggles of life, he immerses us in the struggle, sharing with us his belief that victory is at hand.

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