James MacMillan’s relationship with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra stretches back many decades, to the 1992 premiere of his enduringly popular percussion concerto, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel and beyond to the first years of his career. Like Veni, Veni, his latest work for the SCO is a concerto, albeit one that shies away from the boldly ebullient religious references that characterised many of those early works.
In common with his other recent orchestral works, MacMillan’s Second Violin Concerto, premiered this week by one of its dedicatees Nicola Benedetti (the other being the late Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki) eschews programmatic references entirely. Instead, MacMillan’s drily descriptive programme note offered a roadmap to the externals of the music rather than an insight into the workings of the composer’s mind.
