When it was completed in 1981, what is now Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, was reportedly the largest glass building in the world. This was the venue for which James MacMillan wrote his 2020 choral work Fiat Lux. Its UK premiere, with MacMillan himself conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, was in the very different, subterranean setting of the Barbican Hall.
It started with faint, glimmering breaths from the orchestra, introducing the two soloists, the soprano Mary Bevan and baritone Roderick Williams – he singing Latin, she English. With the horns tracing elemental rising figures, this opening section felt like Britten’s Canticles meeting Wagner’s Das Rheingold, a not unhappy prospect. Further episodes turned in different directions: the men of the excellent chorus intoning Latin against decorative choral soprano lines; perky, cyclical dances on woodwind; a huge organ chord of arrival, coming at us through loudspeakers in the absence of a suitably colossal instrument. The text seemed to evolve almost organically from biblical phrases to Dana Gioia’s evocative poetry.
