The Sixteen/Britten Sinfonia review – MacMillan's mysticism misses its mark

In the Portuguese village of Fátima a century ago, three shepherd children claimed to have been told by the Virgin Mary to expect a miracle; months later, a desperately war-weary crowd duly witnessed the sun moving and changing colour. This is the event commemorated by James MacMillan’s The Sun Danced, commissioned by the organisation behind the Shrine of Fátima to mark its centenary and here receiving its first UK performance, conducted with conviction by Harry Christophers. It was paired with MacMillan’s new Symphony No 5, Le grand Inconnu, a substantial, ruminative meditation on the Holy Spirit that premiered at this summer’s Edinburgh festival.

That’s a lot of Catholic mysticism, and these were less easy for the undevout to buy into than some of MacMillan’s other recent choral works. In The Sun Danced, with texts in Portuguese, Latin and English, Mary Bevan was the gleaming soprano soloist voicing the Virgin, often doubled by a single instrument, which gives them an air of certainty; there is no room for doubting these visions. MacMillan uses a stageful of musicians with brilliant sonic imagination one minute, frustratingly prosaic literalism the next – take the evocative breathing effects that open Le grand Inconnu, flattened out five minutes later when the noise of an actual wind machine is added to the full orchestral mix.

The performers – the Britten Sinfonia and the extended choral forces of the Sixteen – were impeccable, in this and the two openers: Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, played with throbbing intensity, and Britten’s own Hymn to St Cecilia, sung with pinpoint agility. But the two big works, illustrating rather than interrogating their texts, felt like a step backwards for MacMillan since his powerful 2016 Stabat Mater.