The Sixteen & Britten Sinfonia: MacMillan Stabat Mater

An emotionally charged Eastertide sequence, culminating in searingly direct and affecting work of our times – an instant 21st-century classic.

Sir James MacMillan eloquently captures the intensity of Mary’s sorrow at the death of her son, a grief both personal and universal, recognisable to hundreds of thousands of parents around the world in troubled times of migration and war. It is music that conveys a dense despair but also – exquisitely – seems to let the light in, persuading us that no suffering is without consolation, whether we are of faith or not.

It is complemented by the austere purity of Palestrina’s 16th-century setting of the same tableaux for double choir, and by Shostakovich, who pours his own sorrows into a plangent, enigmatic piece for strings (a masterful adaptation of his String Quartet No. 8 for string orchestra), written after witnessing for himself the savage wartime destruction and painstaking rebirth of Dresden.