James MacMillan

It seems one has to start with Isobel Gowdie. Whatever neophobic propogandists may say, there have been warm receptions for other new works at Promenade Concerts, but the thunderous, ecstatic welcome given to James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the 1990 Proms was unprecedented. What made it more remarkable was that this was a capacity Saturday night audience, largely attracted – or so one presumes – by Beethoven's Fourth Symphony and the prospect of hearing the brilliant young Korean violinist Dong Suk-Kang play the Sibelius Violin Concerto. What proportion of that audience was further lured by the picture in the Proms brochure of the good-looking young man, posing moodily in front of the Glasgow Celtic football ground, and the article underneath, with its promise of a heady mixture of catholic-socialist-Scottish indignation, is anybody's guess – but it can't have been the majority.