This is a hauntingly unusual record, one to attract not only admirers of Burgon's very approachable music and lovers of the counter-tenor voice but many more besides. Aptly it has as its centre-piece—placed centrally in the programme order to underline the point—Burgon's most celebrated piece, the setting of the Nunc dimittis that was used as theme music for the BBC television adaptation of John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That setting of the Evensong canticle—originally for treble but well within countertenor range—links the two main themes of the rest of the items here, the Christian message fervently expressed in Canciones del Alma and Worldes Blisse, as well as the nocturnal inspiration of the three other works, two of them song-cycles.
I am glad that Canciones del Alma comes first rather than the Nunc dimittis, the 'pop' item. Burgon has said that in the first and third of these three settings of St John of the Cross poems in the original Spanish he wanted to get away from the church-choir associations of the countertenor voice. He certainly does so in the sensuousness of the writing, directly reflecting the erotic imagery of the poems, typical of Spanish mysticism equally in his music marrying physical response and religious ecstasy. The chains of thirds and clashing seconds for the soloists in duet have an almost bell-like quality in those songs, set against the sharper scherzando middle song. Worldes Blisse, the other religious inspiration, came directly from a dream Burgon had of a counter-tenor and an oboe duetting in church. In the morning he wrote down what he could remember, and this setting of a medieval poem about the Crucifixion is what resulted, again with bell-like clashes in the writing.
Those two works date from the early 1970s, and it is surprising to find—a point underlined in Richard Morrison's highly informative sleeve-note—that Burgon himself ''expresses an abhorrence of organized religion'' and was not even brought up in the Anglican tradition. On this showing he seems to have used the counter-tenor voice more persistently than any other modern composer, and almost inevitably there are frequent echoes of Benjamin Britten's use of counter-tenor, notably Oberon's music in A Midsummer Night's Dream as well as the early cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb. That is particularly so in the first of the nocturnal inspirations Acquainted with Night a student-period work written in 1965, which despite the obvious debts to Britten's Serenade and Nocturne, as well as the works I have mentioned, has a flavour which one already recognizes as characteristic of Burgon.
This Ean Night of 1972 actually dares to set the same text as Britten in the Serenade (and Stravinsky in the Cantata), the Lyke-Wake Dirge and again, despite very clear Britten echoes, the tang of countertenors in duet makes it distinctive. The last item, Lunar Beauty, five settings of early Auden poems and one of Ma c Neice for voice and guitar, is the most recent. In it Burgon marries four lute songs he wrote—with occasional Elizabethan overtones—to two songs for tenor and guitar, each easily adaptable. Here any sensuousness inevitably disappears with such a spare, often sombre, combination, but again the tang of the writing makes it distinctive, much more comfortable for the voice than most vocal music today.
With James Bowman taking the lion's share, appearing in all but Worldes Blisse where Charles Brett has his solo, the performances are strongly committed, with Richard Hickox and the City of London Sinfonia consistently responding to the warmth of the writing. Aptly the EMI engineers have used the helpful acoustic of St Augustine's Church, Kilburn to give an ecclesiastical glow to the sound, while keeping essential clarity.'