When Sir James MacMillan hears the euphonium, he hears home. The Scottish composer and conductor’s piece Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock featuring the euphonium as a solo instrument, is a love letter to his Scottish hometown. The piece is making its U.S. premiere with the Dallas Symphony Orche stra Jan. 22-24 at the Meyerson Symphony Center in the Dallas Arts District. The program will also feature Holst’s The Planets and Walton’s Coronation Te Deum, arranged by Palmer. David Childs, the renowned euphonium player who will be the soloist at the U.S. premiere, commissioned the piece several years ago. Childs, currently on faculty at the University of North Texas, comes from a family of well-respected euphonium players in the United Kingdom and is a product of the British brass band tradition. David Childs, who commissioned the piece, will perform with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra MacMillan, internationally recognized for The Confession of Isobel Gowdie and Veni, Veni Emmanuel, shares Childs’ musical heritage and dedicated the piece in memory of his grandfather, George Loy. “In fact, my grandfather was a coal miner, but crucially, he was also a euphonium player. He played the euphonium in colliery bands, probably in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He got me my first coronet, my first brass instrument, and took me to my first band practices,” MacMillan said. As British coal miners like MacMillan’s grandfather worked through the darkest days of World War II, music illuminated their lives as they played in local brass bands and sang in church choirs. “These were men who loved music one way or another, and I suppose sought out a beauty that was not in their daily working lives, in the dark and the cold, very harsh, physical labor,” MacMillan said. MacMillan never heard his grandfather play, but his grandfather did instill in the aspiring musician a love of music from a young age. “He had a big influence on me,” MacMillan said. “Some of my earliest conversations, earliest memories are of my grandfather and I talking about music. He loved that I was as interested in music as he was.” The title of the piece refers to two rivers, the Lugar and the Glaisnock, that converge in MacMillan’s childhood home town of Cumnock in Ayrshire, Scotland. MacMillan remembers playing in both rivers as a child. “I think there’s subliminal memory of place and also of community and the brass community and of indeed the coal mining community that shaped me, where I found my feet as a person, but also as a musician. It was with affection that I wrote the piece, not just for family and heritage and place, but also the British brass band and particularly the euphonium,” MacMillan said. .Sir James MacMillan dedicated this work to the memory of his grandfather, a coal miner and amateur euphonium player. In this piece, MacMillan takes the euphonium out of the brass band, pairing the instrument’s suppleness and sensitivity with a string orchestra. “I was intrigued by the possibility of taking it out of its comfort zone, as it were. and putting it in a context that was, in a sense, quite new and fresh. The string sound is an interesting and compliant counterpart, I think, to the euphonium. They actually blend very well, and the euphonium can be played as quietly as a string instrument,” MacMillan said. MacMillan conducted the world premiere of this piece in 2025 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, as well as a subsequent performance in Estonia. When he conducts his own work, MacMillan comes to the piece with a fresh perspective. “When I conduct a piece of my own, it feels like learning a new piece from scratch again,” MacMillan said. There is one piece MacMillan did not get to conduct or even rehearse before its premiere: “Who Shall Separate Us?”, an a cappella choral anthem commissioned for the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022. “I was asked to write the piece in 2011, so 11 years before she died and was asked to keep it very, very secret,” MacMillan said. “I wrote the music quickly, delivered  it to the publishers, the publishers sent it to Westminster Abbey, and it went into a drawer for 11 years.” He watched the world premiere of the piece based on one of Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite Bible passages on television, a live broadcast that reached four billion people around the world. Whether it is performed at Westminster Abbey or the Meyerson Symphony Center, new music by living composers adds to the classical music culture established by masters like Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. “It is also a living culture in that composers through the 20th and early 21st century have been attracted to be involved in the culture of classical music and bring new perspectives and new sounds to the orchestra or to the chamber group or to the choir,” MacMillan said. “Yes, it is a culture that values heritage, and the deep past, but it is still a culture in flux and still evolving with excitement, new composers bringing new styles, new aesthetics, new sounds to the concert hall all the time. My ideal listener is someone who is hungry for music that they have not yet heard, and a composer like myself brings music like that to the concert hall in Dallas and elsewhere.” Learn more: Dallas Symphony Orchestra North Texas Arts Culture Art and Culture Jan 10 Shakespeare Dallas kicks off 2026 with winter production of ‘Macbeth' Art and Culture Jan 3 Amon Carter Museum of American Art welcomes 2026 Carter Community Artists This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser. ...read more read less