James Macmillan's percussion concerto Veni, Veni Emanuel was premiered only in 1992, but it has now been performed 300 times. That milestone was reached at Symphony Hall, when Colin Currie was the soloist and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Marin Alsop. Contemporary music isn't accustomed to that kind of success - it is far easier to get a commission for a new work than to find someone willing to give a second performance of something another orchestra or ensemble has introduced. Why then has Veni, Veni, Emanuel become such a spectacular exception to the rule?
No doubt the initial success was due to the high profile in the 1990s of Evelyn Glennie, for whom it was written, though that cannot be the whole story. (Currie, who has also played the piece all over the world, is a less flamboyant interpreter, but much more precise in his attention to the score's rhythmic detail.) There's the approachability of Macmillan's musical language too - the music's basis in the 15th-century Advent plainsong of the same title (also sung here by the City of Birmingham Youth Chorus), the bold primary colours of the orchestration and the solo percussion writing, and the way in which the transformations of the plainsong are easy to trace through the course of the work. Throw in the religious programme about the implication of the Advent message (the "spiritual priorities", as Macmillan calls it), and you have the perfect recipe for contemporary music without tears.
That doesn't make it a good piece, just a popular one, and coming back to Veni, Veni, Emanuel after that decade's worth of performance was salutary. For all its noisy vividness the solo part is almost entirely decorative - roulades of notes from the tuned percussion, spurious rhythmic counterpoints from the array of other instruments - while the musical processes underpinning the orchestral writing are sometimes trite, as when the skeleton of the plainsong is transformed into a dancing Copland-like motif. The ending, with members of the orchestra creating a wash of tinkling, metallic sounds and the soloist striking a set of tubular bells high at the back of the stage, is pure kitsch.
