James Dillon’s links with the Huddersfield festival couldn’t go further back. The first public performance of his music was at the initial festival in 1978, and his new works have appeared there regularly ever since. This year he’s the festival’s composer-in-residence, and the final day on 30 November is devoted to his seven string quartets, played by the Ardittis. But the highlight of Huddersfield’s opening weekend was the world premiere of his 80-minute Stabat Mater Dolorosa for 12 voices and 12 instrumentalists, commissioned by the festival and Radio 3, and introduced by the BBC Singers and the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Ilan Volkov.
Typically for Dillon, whose music has always been multi-layered and as allusive as it can be elusive, his Stabat Mater is much more than a straightforward setting of the familiar medieval meditation. Parts of that text are included, but cross-cut with others, mainly by the structuralist philosopher Julia Kristeva, but also with extracts from Donne, Rilke and Picasso. It’s a rich mix of sources, which is sometimes set in dense choral passages that move with glacial slowness and minimal instrumental commentary or dissolve into busy, chattering profusion and tangled lines; there’s discreet electronic enhancement and spatial projection, though the words become audible only in the closing minutes of the work.
It’s beautiful, distant and compelling. Shape and direction are provided by the instrumental interludes with which Dillon punctuates the choral writing, passages that often have a concertante-like feeling; there’s the deft, 21st-century equivalent of a fleet Mendelssohnian scherzo, a hobbling yet implacable chorale, a lamenting trumpet and irascible solos for contrabass clarinet and double bass. The gestures may be more direct, the harmonies less congested than in earlier Dillon, but the music remains as powerfully individual as ever.
• Broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now on 13 December and repeated at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 21 January 2015. Huddersfield contemporary music festival continues until 30 November.
