To Mahler’s well-known remark that the symphony must be like the world, containing everything, James MacMillan appears to be finding more things to include in his symphonies by often looking beyond it.

His Third pushed sound against the limits of silence, while the powerful Fourth shaped time by pitting movement against stasis. The Fifth is on an even more ambitious scale, combining large choral and orchestral forces to explore that great unknown, the Holy Spirit (hence its subtitle, Le grand Inconnu). Texts are drawn mainly from religious sources such as St John of the Cross, Acts and Genesis, in addition to key words and expressions from several languages, including Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

MacMillan has emphasised that the Fifth Symphony is not a liturgical work and one can certainly relate to it on several levels. The first of its three movements announces itself with scarcely a whisper, sounds gathering around the edges of silence like tiny particles of dust, before finally taking on a more physical shape with the two-syllable utterance ‘Ruah’, the Hebrew word for breath. After a series of loud and dramatic collisions, the music settles into the more familiar surroundings of MacMillan’s mature choral style, with melismatic vocal lines overlapping and echoing one another. Taking its cue from the Greek word for water, ‘Zao’, the second opens with a series of shimmering lines traced in harp, piano and percussion before acquiring a scherzo-like character when a series of solo voices is introduced, and ending with a dazzling display of Tallis-like polyphonic writing. The third draws together elements from the previous two, luxuriating in the warm afterglow of a C major chord to the words ‘O living flame of love’ before exploding into life through pounding metal percussion, full throated brass and fanfare-like perorations. It’s a symphony that manages to create an immediate impression while also revealing hidden depths through repeated listening. The relationship between chorus and orchestra seems even more fully integrated and finely tuned here than in the Stabat mater (5/17), with excellent contributions from The Sixteen, Britten Sinfonia and Genesis Sixteen alike, directed by Harry Christophers.

The other work on the disc, The Sun Danced, for soprano solo, chorus and orchestra, charts the so-called Miracle of the Sun event that took place in Fátima, Portugal, during the summer of 1917. Occurring against the backdrop of the First World War, MacMillan’s setting is held together by a melodic line that appears to draw on the closing four-note figure of Bach’s chorale ‘Es ist genug’. More episodic in design and programmatic in scope, it certainly benefits from an impressive performance by the soprano Mary Bevan.