Commissioned by the BBC in 1993 and first broadcast on television during Easter week of the following year, Seven Last Words from the Cross is one of James MacMillan’s most enduring achievements, a work to which I have found myself returning more than almost any other in hs extensive output. It’s a grippingly intense and enviably concentrated setting for double choir and string orchestra of Jesus’s final utterances combined with texts from other liturgical sources (most notably the Good Friday Responsaries for Tenebrae). Inspiration runs consistently high in this nourishing cantata, not least at the start of the second movement where three times the choir arrestingly cries “Woman, Behold, Thy Son!” (the tension in the silence between the phrases is mesmeric), the third movement’s spellbindingly beautiful treatment of the Good Friday versicle Ecce lignum Crucis, those jagged string chords which launch the sixth movement (“It is finished”) or, perhaps above all, the achingly expressive Scottish lament that is the orchestral postlude, the string-writing bearing MacMillan’s hallmark “keening” style (Jesus’s dying breaths are quite extraordinarily moving). This is the work’s third recording – following on from those under the composer himself (Catalyst, 5/95 – nla) and Stephen Layton (Hyperion, 9/05) – and, on balance, the most compelling and inexorable-sounding yet. Graham Ross secures outstandingly fervent and finely disciplined results from the youthful Dmitri Ensemble (of which he is both co-founder and principal conductor), while the remaining three items are just as impressive, especially the radiantly soaring anthem for double choir Christus vincit (written in 1994 for St Paul’s Cathedral, London). Plaudits must also go to John Rutter, who is credited with the triple role of producer, engineer and editor: technically speaking the disc is little short of a triumph in its combination of truthful sonority and wholly natural perspective. Richly rewarding listening, all of it, and a classy 50th-birthday tribute to MacMillan.