International Composer Festival – Adam’s Rib

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.