A Soulful Body of Work

You’ve got to see it to believe it.

Not Evelyn Glennie’s performance of “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel,” the percussion concerto by the young Scottish composer James MacMillan that the Los Angeles Philharmonic will present during its subscription concerts this week. That you won’t believe even when you do see it--for Glennie, who has been delivering riveting theatrical performances of “Veni, Veni,” is a percussionist who is also deaf.

But almost as unbelievable is the broad reaction that the work has been provoking. At a recent performance by the New York Philharmonic, an audience normally as impatient with new or unfamiliar music as any you are likely to encounter anywhere appeared understandably mesmerized by the soloist but uncharacteristically embraced the composer, when he took his bow, as well. And then there was the spectacle of the orchestra, which is rarely shy about letting the audience know how its feels about a piece, playing at its dazzling peak.

It would, in fact, be possible to talk about “Veni, Veni” in terms of the miraculous. MacMillan is an intensely devout Catholic, and the work is, like much of his music, deeply spiritual. “Veni, Veni” is also, for all it visceral excitement, a work of a certain complexity that has, nonetheless, had a universal success. Since its premiere at the 1992 Proms concerts in London, it has been played by 24 orchestras in 13 countries. And it has done so--another miracle--without controversy. Audiences and critics agree on this one.

But MacMillan, in New York briefly for the “Veni, Veni” performances, professes little interest in miracles. “There’s no real mysticism to my Catholicism,” he says, explaining that his work is really miles apart from that of the so-called holy minimalists like John Tavener or Arvo Part. “What inspires me most is the possible fusion, both in a theological and in an artistic sense, between the political and religious.”

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MacMillan was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1959 and now lives in Glasgow. He has achieved his success--and he is, without question, the most celebrated, performed and loved British composer of his generation--by combining his steady Catholicism with a commitment to the Scottish nationalist movement. He also professes the belief that music cannot represent humanity without also being a corporeal, even erotic, art.

If that combination sounds unlikely, MacMillan concedes that it can make for some confusion.

“I’ve got a funny feeling that these labels--like ‘religious composer,’ ‘political composer,’ ‘left-wing composer’--are merely labels that a lot of British writers use to find pigeonholes for me,” he says. “And because there are so many labels, they’ve lumped them all together into one nonsensical [one]: I’ve seen myself described as the Scottish Roman Catholic left-wing nationalist composer.”

MacMillan says that although he is trying to do many things in his music, he is not necessarily trying to do all those things at the same time. His music might well have a political dimension, or an erotic one, without being overtly spiritual. It can also be abstract.

But these things do have a way of coming together. One of his most popular works is the rapturous tone poem “The Confession of Isobel Gowdie,” which the composer describes as a sort of requiem for a victim of a Protestant witch hunt during the English Reformation, a woman who was burned as a witch for her devotion to Catholicism.

MacMillan, a prolific composer who turns out two or three major works a year and many smaller ones, has to find room, as well, for many purely stylistic interests. And these can include a kind of post-minimalist rhythmic propulsion, a lavish neo-romantic sense of melody and harmony and an intricate weaving in of ancient liturgical or folk musics.

Likewise, MacMillan does acknowledge that the spiritual, the social impulse and the physical are not entirely unrelated.

“Even the religious pieces are very rooted in humanity and our time, our experience, the corporeal experience,” he notes, explaining that the holy minimalists tend instead to be “essentially reflective and transcendent, avoiding worldly conflict, deliberately avoiding the dialectic of the Western tradition.”

Indeed, for MacMillan, the religious and political are often inseparable, in the form of liberation theology.

“I suppose in the popular mind liberation theology is associated with Latin America, where rightly or wrongly a political dimension has emerged in the teaching of the gospel,” MacMillan says. “The teaching of the gospel has stressed the political dimension, the fact that the gospel is good news for the poor. And since a preferential option for the poor was being preached through the gospel during the fascist time in South America, there was [a] strange alliance between figures in the church and figures on the left.

“But I personally think of liberation theology as being much more traditional--not just some kind of trendy alternative to Catholic teaching but something that’s actually in with the bricks of Catholic teaching. Liberation theology is the Christian faith as far as I can see.”

MacMillan’s own acute Scottish nationalism expresses itself in many of his works, including “Isobel Gowdie.” In a recent piano concerto, “The Berserking,” he notes that the title comes from the way ancient Viking and Celtic warriors prepared for battle by working themselves into a frenzy with mead, mushrooms and hyperventilation. But this “berserking” process actually proved suicidal since it made them vulnerable to a stealthy attack.

“I see its pointlessness,” MacMillan writes in the notes to the new BMG recording of the piece, “as resembling the Scots’ seeming facility for shooting themselves in the foot in political and, for that matter, in sporting endeavors.”

MacMillan’s success as a composer has made him a spokesman for Scottish art and the nationalist movement. In 1993, he was the featured composer at the Edinburgh Festival, where 18 of his works, including several premieres, were performed (at the same time, his wife gave birth to twins).

This summer, he will be featured again, with a new opera, “Ines de Castro,” that is neither liturgical nor overtly political but rather a love story that goes horribly wrong, full of sex and violence. The composer contends that it is often missed that “a lot of the extra-musical subject matter in my work, regardless of religious output, is to do with the opposite sex.”

“Ines de Castro,” MacMillan explains, “was a Spanish woman who was the mistress of the Portuguese prince in the 13th century, when the two countries were at war. So when the prince was off fighting her people, the politicians conspired to have her murdered.

“Returning victorious from the war, the prince visited a terrible revenge on all those responsible. He exhumed the corpse and had her crowned alongside him and forced the courtiers to pay homage to her.”

The libretto--adapted from a play by John Clifford--is imbued, MacMillan says, “with a sense of [the] archetypal, of the classical, which appealed to me. I didn’t want to do either a biblical story or a Mediterranean mythological story. I wanted something historical for the opera, but also quite different.”

The stage, though, seems as if it must be in MacMillan’s blood, given the sheer choreographic nature of “Veni, Veni,” which is essentially just an abstract percussion concerto. But the composer concedes that he had himself never realized such a theatrical potential until Glennie began developing it.

“I suppose I knew that there would be some kind of movement, but not that she would dash around a lot, or that it would be quite so exciting to watch. She has a real sense of presence and is able to make something ritualistic of the movement from the front of the stage to the back, as she mounts a podium where she hits these huge bass tubular bells with hammers. That’s certainly something you miss from the CD.”

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“Veni, Veni, Emmanuel,” Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Friday 1:30 p.m. $6-$58. Information: (213) 365-3500.