British composer Geoffrey Burgon has managed to carve out a career as a composer without becoming pigeonholed into a particular genre or musical style. He is perhaps best known for his scores for Monty Python's Life of Brian, and BBC's Brideshead Revisited, and an excerpt from his score for the film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy appeared on Britain's Top Ten pop charts. He is equally at home writing for voice and chorus, and a significant part of his catalog is devoted to choral music, some of which is collected on this CD. Burgon's graceful and idiomatic choral writing makes use of contemporary harmonies, but his musical language is basically tonal, rooted in centuries of liturgical tradition; as the program notes aptly describe it, it "manages to sound both timeless and strikingly modern." "At the round earth's imagined corners," using a text by John Donne, and his setting of the Nunc Dimittis are particularly effective in their conjuring of mystery and complex emotion using very simple musical means. The Wells Cathedral Choir, a men and girls choir, conducted by Matthew Owens and accompanied by organist David Bednall, gives unaffected and direct performances, singing with pure and rapt tone. The soloists, members of the Choir, are of variable quality. Hyperion's sound is spacious, but not too resonant to obscure the comprehensibility of the texts. |
