Martin Roscoe - James MacMillan: Into the Ferment (2003)

The nine-movement suite Into the Ferment, written for professional chamber ensemble and youth orchestra, may have been revised last year, but most of the music on this disc is relatively ancient by James MacMillan's standards. Britannia dates from 1994, The Berserking and the original version of Into the Ferment from the late 1980s. The results are more exuberant, more anarchic than MacMillan's recent works - and to my ears, at least, all the better for it.
Britannia, written for the Association of British Orchestras, is a collage, Ives-like in its range of references: it quotes from the likes of God Save the Queen and Lilliburlero as well as MacMillan's own music. Like all the best humour, it is underpinned by a serious message, in this case about the follies of petty nationalism. It is also a rather expert orchestral showpiece.
The Berserking is a piano concerto in everything but name, and a big-boned one at that - half an hour of music in three linked movements. The starting point was a Celtic football match, in which the team produced, in MacMillan's words, "a characteristically passionate, frenzied but ultimately futile display". From that he extended the image to the ancient Celtic warriors, the Berserkers, who would work themselves up for a battle in a similarly unfocused way. That swaggering drive fuels the first movement, while the cool, collected centrepiece is an evocation of Celtic folk music and Hebridean psalmody before the macho energy returns again.
It is highly effective and the solo part is given just the right amount of aggressive edge on this recording by Martin Roscoe. There are effective moments, too, in Into the Ferment, which is based on the events in a Robert Burns poem, with occasional clues to a quiet lyricism sheltering beneath the noisy eruptive surfaces.