Acoustic designs

Last year, in return for running the Edinburgh Festival since 2006, Jonathan Mills received a knighthood. This year, in return for his knighthood, he is giving Edinburgh the opportunity to hear his tragic  oratorio, the Sandakan Threnody, in a performance by the Festival Chorus and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by the zealous Ilan Volkov.

It’s the first time  an Edinburgh Festival director has appeared at the festival as a composer. But then, according to Wikipedia, that is what Mills primarily is -  as a pupil of his fellow Australian, Peter Sculthorpe, he has two operas (he’s working on a third) and a ballet to his credit, as well as his oratorio and his artfully entitled Four First Songs.  No doubt he has also composed other things - a concerto and chamber music have been mentioned -  along with running other festivals. What's more, he successfully studied architecture, specialising in acoustic design and “the role of sound in the built environment.” 

Yet although his second opera  was performed and filmed for television in London, Mills the composer has remained an unknown quantity in Edinburgh. His oratorio, dating from 2001, received its premiere at the Sydney Opera House and is a valediction for the 2345 Australian and Britsh  prisoners of war who were sent by the Japanese on a death march from Sandakan in Borneo, where Sir Jonathan’s father, later to become a distinguished heart surgeon, had been a prisoner.

In a festival which this year is commemorating some of the horrors of war with performances of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, Berlioz’s The Trojans, Britten’s Owen Wingrave, War Requiem  and Sinfonia da Requiem,  Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony and Beethoven's Eroica, the work will be in imposing company. And although we might feel meanly inclined to pontificate on why a festival  should serve  as showcase for its director’s own music, we should perhaps respond on this occasion with the question, “Why not?”  It was something Britten did as a matter of course at Aldeburgh. and with the highest artistic success.  

26 June 2014