BBC Music Magazine: Pick of the Month; Penguin Guide 3 stars; Klassik Heute 10/10/10. James MacMillan’s Symphony ‘Vigil’, the final part of his Easter triptych Triduum, traces a spiritual arc from desolation to transfiguration. The opening movement, paradoxically titled Light, inhabits a landscape of profound darkness: low strings murmur in divided glissandi, distant plainchant emerges like a fragile memory, and silence itself becomes structural, charged with expectation. In the central Tuba insonet salutaris, ceremony and wild energy collide as spatially placed brass intone the Easter proclamation, their ritualistic fanfares fractured by explosive percussion and ecstatic outbursts. The expansive final movement, Water, unleashes elemental force. Violins enter at last, spiralling upward through turbulence toward a blazing, dance-like climax, where chant fragments and a two-note motto are transformed into symbols of renewal. Under Osmo Vänskä, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra shapes this vast progression with clarity and conviction, balancing visceral power with moments of suspended stillness. The symphony closes not in triumphal excess, but in consecrated radiance — sound purified into silence.