Stabat mater, commissioned by The Marian Consort for their 10th anniversary, continues to receive outstanding reviews. The Church Times, writing about the first performance in Merton college Chapel, said ‘Jackson’s musical voice is so bold and fresh that it is essentially his own’ and that ‘Jackson’s great success is that he gives us these — the prolonged anguish and intermittent solace are both palpable — and yet he still manages to preserve an underlying consistency. He controls his material like a Renaissance master. It requires a fine art and meticulous skill to achieve that.’
Gramophone, reviewing the first recording on Delphian Records, wrote that ‘…this 20-minute setting is a major new work from Jackson and an unsettlingly powerful one’ and that ‘…this feels like a modern classic in the making, sensitive and endlessly responsive to the text.’
BBC Music Magazine wrote that ‘…the curvaceous vocal lines are compromised by anxious melisma, catching the febrility of the raw human emotions experienced by the onlookers’ and for Musicweb, ‘…Jackson’s setting of the great medieval poem is a very fine one indeed. As I’ve come to expect with this composer, he writes most imaginatively and sympathetically for the voices – ten singers are used here – and at every turn his music seems to complement and enhance the words marvellously.’
BBC radio 3’s Record Review called the Stabat mater ‘devastatingly beautiful’ and ‘a major new addition to the canon.’
