Birthday Present was written in 1997 for the birthday of Hazel Sheppard, the administrator of the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust (ECAT), and it too has its roots in Symphony 'Vigil', employing a chord sequence used in the third movement of that work as an underlay to a rather idiosyncratic (but characteristic) harmonisation of the well-known melody. This piece takes material and develops it in new directions; by contrast Angel, written in 1993 as a gift for the composer's daughter Catherine, strips things down to the barest essentials: twenty-six notes or chords, with no fixed duration (each is between six and ten seconds at the discretion of the performer), played at a very soft dynamic. This material originally appeared in the ethereal closing minutes of MacMillan's piano concerto The Berserking, played in free time by the piano, harp and celesta, itself a distillation of the hazy harmonies which underpin the concerto's middle movement.
The Piano Music of James MacMillan The works on this disc comprise all of James MacMillan's music for solo piano to date. For such a prolific composer, this is a curiously small portion of his total output. However, these works are wonderfully individual and offer some fascinating contrasts. MacMillan has never been afraid of reusing material, and a number of the piano pieces are what the composer calls 'satellite pieces' - works either taken directly from or based on a small idea from a much larger work. Lumen Christi began life as a sketch for MacMillan's Symphony 'Vigil' (1997) and indeed appears there, note for note, at the end of the second movement, played on the celesta. It is testament to the strong character of the musical material that it works as well as an isolated miniature as it does as a tiny part of a fifty-minute orchestral canvas. The piece is based on the first four notes of the 'Lumen Christi' chant, which are repeated over and over again at the top of the texture while the harmony slowly and subtly changes in the background. Though beginning simply enough, an unsettling polytonal opposition is reached in the middle of the piece, and the end is not entirely conclusive.The soundworld of the piece is suggestive of a music box, or a 'child's clockwork musical toy', symbolic of innocence - an effect of which MacMillan is fond, and which can be found in a number of his other works.
MacMillan is equally at home writing around the music of other composers. Barncleupédie is Satie with a Scottish twist, and was composed in 1990 for a couple of the composer's friends upon a visit to their farm in Barncleugh, Dumfriesshire. It humorously sumperimposes a Burns song ("Will ye no come back again?") over a familar, simple accompaniment alluding to Satie's Trois Gymnopédies. A Cecilian Variation for JFK could not be more different in character. It was composed as one of a composite set of piano variations on 3
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