From Amazon.com
The uncompromising music of James MacMillan offers the listener an opportunity to enter a wild, challenging world. BIS is doing contemporary music a great service by recording two fascinating concertos in stunning sound, with foremost musicians as soloists.
Epiclesis is a concerto for trumpet and orchestra. It is dedicated to John Wallace, who is also the soloist on this occasion. MacMillan's extreme technical demands are dispatched with authority, the recording revealing the orchestral detail with exemplary clarity.
Epiclesis is Greek for "prayer" or "plea." In the second section, two other trumpets join the main soloist in an aural representation of the Trinity.
Ninian is a clarinet concerto written in response to the shadowy figure of its title, who was associated with 14 miracles. MacMillan's aural imagination is again impressive. The second movement ("Dream of Pectgils") is an athletic, spiky dance while in the final movement nightmarish sonorities stand side by side with naive, childlike ones. John Cushing (principal clarinet with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) gives a virtuoso account of the vividly imagined solo part.
--Colin Clarke
