On 24 March The Passion of Mary Magdalene, Tansy Davies’ radical reimagining of the Easter story, premiered at the Barbican with Dunedin Consort, directed by John Butt. The 85-minute piece, whose three parts play without a break, was commissioned by the Dunedin Consort, the Barbican Centre and the Edinburgh International Festival.
Bringing repressed voices into the light, Davies’ new oratorio draws on the non-canonical gospels, poetry by Ruth Fainlight, and ancient mystical texts to recast Mary Magdalene as a multifaceted spiritual leader. Soprano Anna Dennis sang the title role, with baritone Marcus Farnsworth as Jesus.
The Passion of Mary Magdalene will appear at the Edinburgh International Festival on 8 August. It makes its Netherlands debut with Het Muziek, Hermes Ensemble, and Anna Dennis on 18 March 2027 at the Muziekgebouw, conducted by Clark Rundell.
…a startlingly sensual meditation with a sense of ritual – and an electric guitar hidden amid the baroque instrumentation…more of a meditation than a Passion-setting in the traditional sense, but there’s no new-age looseness: Davies’s score is tautly written…it begins with a low note on the harpsichord, pulsing at walking pace. This returns several times, adding to the work’s sense of ritual and giving the music the sense of being linked to human movement…The music supports the singers, or adds a halo around them, with intricate skill…Everything is cyclical and grounded but nothing stays quite the same…Davies’s intriguing score is its own reward.
The Guardian (Erica Jeal) 25 March 2026 ****
…clear, and beautiful, sensuality…a hypnotic sense of wonder...Prime, though, is Davies’s use of her instrumental forces…a Janus-headed ensemble looking backwards to the Baroque and forwards to the music of today and beyond. Davies’s scoring was more than deft: it peeled away layers of the text, a light shining beneath the words…the use of period sonority is genius… this is required listening.
Opera Today (Colin Clarke) 26 March 2026
The concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show on 4 April, on the Easter Weekend. Dunedin Consort presented the work on period instruments, including oboes, recorders (doubling flutes), bass lute, harpsichord, as well as an electric guitar. The Netherlands premiere in 2027 will be performed with the alternative modern instrumentation set out by Davies in the score.
Discussing its music to Alexandra Coghlan in The Tablet, the composer described it as “both sensual and gritty, with plenty of extremes of light and dark and high and low. It’s simultaneously old and new, quite haunting, quite electric…It’s like a slightly fast heartbeat”.