“MacMillan brought obvious authority to the podium and drew some lively playing from the BSO strings in the concerto… The edgy, unpredictable qualities in MacMillan's music helped to reiterate just how edgy and unpredictable Beethoven could be, even in such an early symphony as this one. Every sudden dynamic shift in the latter recalled to mind all the surprises in the former... Beethoven's Second Symphony is particularly rich in potent ideas, as MacMillan illustrated in remarks to the audience before going on to produce a thoughtful, invigorating performance. He offered much more than mere traffic control, emphasizing the work's sinewy power and paying attention to the subtleties that give it so much character. The orchestra jumped into the action with impressive force.”
The Baltimore Sun, 5 April 2008
“For audiences who think they hate modern music, there's nothing to fear here… this music is wild stuff, but it's good, vigorous music and deserves to be performed by major ensembles... A scintillating reading of Beethoven's delightful but infrequently performed Symphony No. 2… The players executed Mr. MacMillan's sunny concept of the work with infectious enthusiasm, particularly in the quirky scherzo and the rousing finale.”
The Washington Times, 5 April 2008
"Fervently Scottish, fervently Catholic, fervently fervent, he writes music like Wilberforce or Lincoln wrote speeches: burning with righteous anger, infused with missionary passion, vivid in language, and without a whiff of pretension or obfuscation. And his energy is inexhaustible: in his mid-forties, he has already produced nearly 150 major works."
The Times, April 2007
"James MacMillan's percussion feast Veni, Veni Emmanuel, with the vigorously wonderful Colin Currie... where Currie and Alsop were in perfect synch, riding the score's tumultuous journey from strife through joy to the ting-a-ling Easter coda. Exciting music, excitingly performed."
The Times, February 2007
"A new James MacMillan recording is always an event, and his organ and piano concertos both offer unfailingly inventive music."
Classical Music, December 2006
"Three days later Hereford Cathedral heard the first UK performance of James MacMillan's extraordinary Sun-Dogs, a Three Choirs co-commission with organisations in the United States, Netherlands and Canada. Written with immense assurance and vivid imagination, Sun-Dogs is another of MacMillan's works proudly drawn from the Catholic faith, extracts from the Roman Missal seasoning this setting of a complex, allegorical poem by Michael Symmons Roberts.
Its five movements are set for large unaccompanied choir, and the Festival Chorus, under the composer's compelling direction, brought it vividly to life.
All sorts of choral and compositional devices are employed here, ranging from a Pendereckian overlapping or repeated textures delivered in free time to insouciant whistling, a hurly-burly of response which at times becomes almost sacramental, as in the fourth movement, quoting directly from The Last Supper."
Classical Music, December 2006
"Scotch Bestiary is full of a black vitality which always threatens to explode into pure chaos. ... It's all brought off with tremendous zest by Wayne Marshall and the BBC Philharmonic under the composer's direction; but they're just as much at home in the contemplative, painfully affectionate parts of the Concerto."
BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2006
"MacMillan himself conducted the BBC Philharmonic for Saturday's Pickaquoy Centre performance of his own The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. Sixteen years on from the performances that established his name, the composer produced a seamless, swift account of the score."
The Herald, June 2006
"On Monday night, at St Magnus Cathedral, MacMillan conducted the Scottish Ensemble and Cappella Nova in a beautiful performance of his 1994 piece Seven Last Words from the Cross, an experience almost as demanding of an enthralled audience as it was of the performers, and as powerful as Mackay Brown's poetry in its sense of the deep, mysterious silence that must follow all human utterance, and all our attempts to make sense - or art - of our short time in the light."
The Scotsman, June 2006
"[The Confession of Isobel Gowdie is] a moving, subtle elegiac response to his [MacMillan's] own work which he himself describes as a requiem."
The Scotsman, June 2006
"Throughout, Benedetti's gently ardent playing, nimbly articulate in the finale, is enhanced by a lively and detailed response from the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. James MacMillan, now developing a career as a conductor of varied repertoire, ensures a tactile response from the orchestra, with some lovely woodwing contributions, all of which ensures a new-minted account of this loveliest of concertos.
MacMillan's own From Ayrshire is an atmospheric conclusion to this release, the violinist musing on a Scottish song (the well-known 'Ca the Yowes', seemingly the creation of Robert Burns, rather than being of the 'folk' variety). Such reflections turns to greater emotional import; it's a heart-touching piece that concludes with an energetic, somewhat crazed (maybe inebriated) reel."
Classical Source, May 2006
"It was refreshing to find the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Northern College of Music collaborating on a small festival celebrating the music of the 54-year-old composer Poul Ruders. James Macmillan conducted the BBC Philharmonic, the fleet strings alternately fidgeting restlessly and drawing long, sweeping brush-strokes in music with defined, sculptural textures. Pointed woodwind added such colour that you hardly noticed the absence of percussion."
The Independent, February 2006
"James MacMillan's Cantos Sagrados , combining poems concerning political repression in Latin America with liturgical texts in Latin, is surely among the best products of his first flood of inspiration. It is characteristically raw and derivative in places, but also occasionally ravishing, and full of integrity."
The Independent, January 2006
“…the great virtue of these marvellous BBC composer weekends [is that] they allow us to roam around a composer’s inner world, and see how it changes over time, and how the elements acquire weight and subtlety. Of course that’s only valuable if the composer in question really has conjured a world worth getting to know, and this weekend made it clear MacMillan is one of the few British composers who have.”
The Daily Telegraph, January 2005
"The BBC Symphony Chorus crackled with vigour and crisp enunciation: a tribute to their talent and drilling, and MacMillan's early gift for the immediate, dramatic and emotional."
The Times, January 2005
"...[MacMillan's] music has an immense heat and appetite, seizing hold of other musical references and bending them to it's will."
The Daily Telegraph, January 2005
"I wish I knew what James MacMillan eats for breakfast. With 120 compositions already under his belt, the flying Scot is writing music with as much fervour and ingenuity as anyone on the planet. As was amply demonstrated by this BBC weekend devoted to his music, his passion and energy seem inexhaustible... he is, paradoxically, the most powerful voice in British music today - by a mile. Though fused from a thousand diverse sacred and secular influences, his pieces are instantly recognisable, intellectually coherent, fizzing with ideas, gloriously coloured, and without a whiff of pretension or obfuscation. And who knows how his imagination will ripen, darken or deepen in the years ahead. After all, he is only 45."
The Times, January 2005
"The sense of whimsy inspired by the sight of pickup-sticks organ pipes bursting forth behind the stage led MacMillan through a stage of mental associations: Disney, cartoons, the Warner Bros classics, their daffy Carl Stalling soundtracks. What MacMillan has come up with is a two-part, quirkily animated concerto... a musical book of fanciful animals impersonated by organ and orchestra... MacMillan seems at times almost a Scottish Ives. But what sounds he gets from both orchestra and organ! And with Marshall, we finally get an organist with big-time flair and technique... to have one's ears seduced and trampled by this musical monster, an ever-transmogrifying musical trickster, is an experience not to be found anywhere else."
Los Angeles Times
"The piece was certainly fun: riotous, at times cacophonous, wittily orchestrated and cleverly structured. It also brilliantly integrated the organ into the orchestra proper. Reptiles and fish were conjured on organ pedals and tuba, with percussion and other brasses lending texture. Buzzing from the organ effectively suggested a queen bee, and a snare drum gave the howler monkey his martial personality... All these things (and more) merged in the work's second half, a crazy but exciting amalgam..."
Los Angeles Daily News
“…an orchestral concert delivered with supreme confidence by the BBC Philharmonic under James MacMillan…given a conductor as attuned as MacMillan to large-scale drama as well as to immediacy of impact, and given an orchestra for whom no challenge is too much, the sheer élan of the writing was again hard to resist.”
The Daily Telegraph , October 2004
“That is MacMillan’s great gift: to make a complex but white-hot passion immediately coherent and persuasive.”
The Times , August 2004
“Veni, Veni, Emmanuel with composer James MacMillan on the conductor’s podium was a great experience… A particular highlight is the intimate middle movement where the marimba, beautifully accompanied by the orchestra, was completely spellbinding…A night to remember!”
Nya Wermlands-Tiodningen , March 2004
“Fortunately, the was no unruly behaviour from the SSO, which was in obedient form, responding to MacMillan’s clear direction with precision and verve, needed not only in his own work but in Elgar’s momentous Enigma Variations…some splendid brass playing summoned the radiance of a summer’s day in Elgar’s Malvern Hills.”
Sydney Morning Herald , August 2004
“The Scotsman is a splendid conductor who took extraordinary care with the two works of his colleague and infinite care with the first performance in Spain of his own Third Symphony.”
Crítica el País , May 2004
“The composer himself conducted a pair of choral works…His setting of the cantat’s third section felt like a Flemish old-master Crucifixion paining in sound: delicate, agonizing and of imperishable beauty.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution , April 2004
“Composers who turn to conducting aren’t always successful, but James MacMillan is emerging as a strong, assured interpreter of his own music, and the Chandos recordings do him full justice.”
BBC Music Magazine, September 2003
“A towering performance by the BBC Philharmonic under the composer James MacMillan. He is proving a conductor of daunting ability.”
The Sunday Times, May 2003
“MacMillan’s work, A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, is tremendously dramatic… the orchestration also grips the ear with its unearthly sonorities, sour quarter-tones and howling singers (in fact MacMillan’s own voice, multi-tracked on tape). It was brilliantly delivered by the LSO Ensemble directed by the composer himself.”
The Times, March 2003
“The most exciting young British composer to have emerged in the 1990s.”
The Guardian
“There is something special about hearing the work of a pupil interpreted by his or her teacher. Perhaps it is the sense of a mentor having a special insight into the music, even having shaped it, which lends the stamp of authority. A similar feeling of authenticity informed James MacMillan’s direction of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) in a world premiere by his Royal Scottish Academy pupil Edward Rushton… This compelling performance capped an evening’s music-making of exceptional quality in an intelligently planned programme.”
The Independent, December 2001
“The Sydney Symphony Orchestra went at it hammer and tongs in its latest Town Hall concert of recent music under the direction of the Scottish composer James MacMillan.”
Sydney Morning Herald, November 2001