Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

Commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and premiered on 5 August 1992 at the BBC Proms, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel by the Scottish composer James MacMillan (born 1959) is one of the most celebrated percussion concertos of the late twentieth century and one of the finest works ever composed for the instrument. Written for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the work takes the medieval Advent plainchant melody as its structural and spiritual foundation, weaving it through seventeen continuous sections of increasing complexity and intensity. The soloist moves through an enormous array of instruments — marimba, vibraphone, crotales, brake drum, bongos, timbales, and many others — in a journey that MacMillan describes as a meditation on the incarnation and the longing for divine presence. The music integrates MacMillan's characteristic synthesis of Scottish folk idiom, Catholic spirituality, and modernist harmonic language into a work of overwhelming cumulative power. The finale, in which the orchestra joins the soloist in a shattering fortissimo statement of the plainsong, has become one of the iconic moments of late twentieth-century concert music.