Countertenor James M. Brown and friends celebrate the LGBTQ community
By Chris Ruel
Photo: Martyn Goddard
Celestial and Earthly Beauty on Display
While we expect singers to perform well in duets and trios, sometimes the chemistry just isn’t there. That wasn’t the case. Brown sang with all the artists, and their ability to mix seamlessly with those of their colleagues was beautiful to hear. They picked the right vocalists with whom to share the stage.
This was clear from the opening work, with Brown singing Britten’s ballad, “Mother Comfort,” in duet soprano Samantha Noonan. Britten was a vigorous advocate of the countertenor voice and holds a special place in Brown’s heart. They discovered the piece when staging other Britten song cycles.
Noonan has an impressive vocal range and technical skill. Her shiny tone twinkled with brilliance; a perfect set-up for Burgon’s “Lunar Beauty.”
Britten inspired Geoffrey Burgon’s cycle with the texts pulled from WH Auden. (On the whole, the evening’s music was filled with literary texts and inspirations.) Though sung with piano, Burgon’s song was originally scored for lute and countertenor.
The English composer gained fame for his television and film scores such as “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “The Dogs of War.” But he also created an extensive body of work that spanned multiple genres, including orchestral and vocal pieces, such as “Lunar Beauty.” The cycle, though written centuries after Dowland, has a marvelous Baroque sound. While the tessitura is high, Borgun takes countertenors into their lower ranges.
Jarrar’s playing matched the overall quietness of the cycle, except for “Lady, weeping, at the crossroads,” which devolved into delicious musical chaos with a much faster pace and aggressive piano line.
It’s the 12th anniversary of Geoffrey Burgon’s death. We celebrate his life and work today and reflect on his great contribution to music, colleagues, friends and family.
We are building a new site for Geoffrey which will be up in the next months. We were unable to update this site during the pandemic but we have it running now until the new site is completed.
We are delighted to announce Geoffrey’s “Heavenly Things” is being performed by Jacob Harrison and Louis Mander October 1st, 2022. Here are the concert details:
THE ART OF SONG WITH JACOB HARRISON
- Saturday, October 1, 2022
- 7:00 PM 9:00 PM
- St Peter’s Belsize ParkBelsize SquareLondon, England, NW3United Kingdom (map)
- Google Calendar ICS
An evening celebrating the art song in its many expressions, this recital forms part of the festival of literature, art and music at St Peter’s Belsize Park in North London, showcasing the talented young bass-baritone Jacob Harrison and pianist composer Louis Mander, in a varied program of music ranging from Schubert and Brahms to the present day.
The recital will include the world premiere of a new song cycle for baritone and piano by Louis Mander Four Songs of Ganymede. Music will also include songs by Hugo Wolf, Brahms and Schubert as well as some haunting American spirituals and also a pair of rarely heard and beautiful song settings by composer Geoffrey Burgon, whose music for Film and TV is known across the world.
Tickets £12 and are available by emailing tickets@stpetersbelsizepark.org.uk or on the door.
Terry Jones 01.02.1942 – 21.01.2020
We would like to give tribute to this very kind, thoughtful, intelligent, talented and daring man. A good friend to the Burgon family and to all who knew him. He will be missed by all of us. We send our thoughts and love to his family.
Choir highlights English composer Bob Chilcott
BY KATHALEEN ROBERTS / JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
Sunday, October 27th, 2019 at 12:02am
Maxine Thévenot conducts at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Contemporary English composer Bob Chilcott’s Requiem Mass will echo throughout the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John on All Souls Day on Saturday, Nov. 2.
While not as familiar to choral music fans as John Rutter, Chilcott’s résumé includes singing in the Cambridge University choir as both a boy and a student, as well as a founding member of the Kings Singers.
“He’s kind of like the up-and-coming John Rutter,” cathedral music director and organist Maxine Thévenot said.
Like Rutter’s, Chilcott’s music is melodic, tuneful and accessible, yet it still draws the interest of the best classical musicians, Thévenot said.
The 40-minute piece features flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, French horn, timpani and organ, along with the Cathedral Choir.
“I think people will find a light within the darkness,” Thévenot said.
Geraint Lewis’ “The Souls of the Righteous” will open the concert.
“It’s highly emotionally charged,” Thévenot said.
A nine-member teenage choir will close the performance with Geoffrey Burgon’s “Nunc Dimittis” with trumpet and organ.
“The text is all about offering our thoughts and prayers to the person who has died,” Thévenot said.
The title means “Let our servant depart in peace.”
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: 40 years on, the labyrinthine thriller is still TV caviar
The BBC adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel mystified a nation – but also featured one of the greatest performances ever seen on the small screen
Paul MacInnes
Thu 5 Sep 2019 12.45 BST Last modified on Fri 6 Sep 2019 23.38 BST
Sir Alec Guinness in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979).
Sir Alec Guinness in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). Photograph: BBC
Forty years ago, the BBC broadcast its adaptation of the John Le Carré novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the first time. Starring Sir Alec Guinness as George Smiley, the master spy hunting down a Soviet mole in the British intelligence services, it provoked controversy. Largely over whether it made any sense or not.
While Nancy Banks-Smith, in her review for the Guardian, called Tinker Tailor “the very best caviar”, Clive James in the Observer was of a different mind. “The first instalment,” he wrote, “fully lived up to the standard set by the original novel. Though not quite as incomprehensible, it was equally turgid.”
You get the feeling, from the way James begrudgingly warmed to the drama as it ran its course (“Anything can improve,” he wrote, “even Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, of which the latest episode was a good deal less wearisome than the previous three”), that some of the invective was for effect. But he was not alone in finding the material challenging. Working out whether you had a clue what was going on in Tinker Tailor became something of a national pastime. Larry Grayson even joked about it in the Generation Game.
In 2019, it is not just the bluffs and double bluffs (and treble and quadruple bluffs) that viewers might find baffling. It is the world in which the drama is set, the way its inhabitants behave and what – if anything – they believe in. Tinker Tailor very much remains TV caviar. But it is also, from today’s vantage point, a remarkable insight into a different time, one that itself offered a window on to another, dying world.
Terence Rigby and Alec Guinness in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
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Terence Rigby and Alec Guinness in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Photograph: BBC
Tinker Tailor’s director, John Irvin, now 79, is one of the few people still alive who was involved in the production. His understanding of what the story required, he says, was filtered through values born of empire. “What we wanted to reveal dramatically was the complexity of the secret state,” he says. “The contradictions, the betrayals of loyalty. The aspect that I latched on to, I think, the one I felt personally, was the idea of service. Christian service and service to country. How that sense of Christian service could be corrupted into the most mendacious and reckless behaviour was something I was preoccupied with throughout the telling of the story.”
While we are still living in a Britain ruled by public school elites, this aristocratic concept of service would appear long gone. In 2019, it is a struggle to find anyone articulating a case for “doing good”, even disingenuously. Tinker Tailor may be a story about betrayal, the hunt for a mole at the heart of MI6, but it occurs in a world defined by rules and procedures. In the modern era, with all its disruption and executive action, that seems odd. A final jarring dissonance between Smiley’s world and ours is the aesthetic of it all, the drab locations and sallow flesh. It depicts a country wearing its decline on its sleeve. Our contemporary age would never admit to as much (and indeed it did not in the 2011 film version, where everything was carefully stylised and in the colour scheme of a 70s sitcom).
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Watching Tinker Tailor today, you feel teleported: you get the thrill of watching something that is complex, that you can’t quite make sense of but desperately wish to. (In 1979, the debate over Tinker Tailor’s complexity continued into the Guardian’s letters pages, with the counterpoint to the Larry Grayson position being articulated by a Dr Graham Nicholls, who made the case that “People love being mystified”.)
You also get to watch something that is slow and often silent, and all the more powerful for that. “Arthur [Hopcraft] in his dialogue left a lot of space for silence,” says Irvin of the celebrated Guardian journalist who went on to a brief but glittering career as a screenwriter. “It wasn’t like working with Pinter, where it was deliberate, but it gave a chance to see what’s going on behind the mask. A spy story is a succession of masks. It’s poker – the silence is when you are trying to read the other’s mind. If people talk a lot, they’re not going to be very good spies. The trick was in timing the silence so that you don’t overdo it and it becomes tedious, but leaving it long enough that it became tantalising.”
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Photograph: BBC
Those moments worked as Irvin hoped, and form the centre of Tinker, Tailor. They are like the extended interrogations in Line of Duty, except the tension is more drawn out and there are more gaps the viewer is encouraged to fill. Those interrogations would not have been remotely as effective, however, had they not featured one of the greatest acting performances ever delivered on the small screen.
Sir Alec Guinness, it was suggested at the time, was able to play Smiley because he was rolling in Star Wars money. His reluctance to take the part of Obi-Wan Kenobi had led him to ask for 2% of the film’s box office takings. That turned out to be a smart move and allowed Guinness some latitude in selecting his next roles. According to Irvin, however, that did not mean he leapt at the prospect of Tinker, Tailor. “He needed three lunches with me and certainly a lunch with David [Cornwell, AKA John Le Carré] and the head of MI6 to be convinced that he would commit.”
Eventually he did commit, and Guinness set about fully engaging with a character he described to the Guardian at the time as being “a vulnerable man who … is capable of taking unexpectedly swift and rather harsh action”.
For Irvin, working with Guinness was “a deep, creative partnership”, but it had its strengths and weaknesses. Guinness’s pull meant that the supporting cast – from Ian Richardson to Beryl Reid – were easy to acquire. Requiring more time and patience, however, was Guinness himself.
“Like a lot of great artists, there were moments of great insecurity,” Irvin says. “He rang me at four o’clock in the morning on a Sunday before a shoot, saying that he hadn’t really found George Smiley and that it would be much better if we just recast. He also said that he couldn’t put on any more weight, he didn’t feel right.
“I don’t know whether it was a provocation or not, but this made me quite angry. I said: ‘It’s not about the size of George Smiley’s tummy; it’s about the size of his massive brain, for heaven’s sake.’ We were about to shoot in two hours, so I said: ‘Let’s go back to sleep, we’ve got to get some rest.’ A little later I arrive at Primrose Hill and he’s standing entirely alone in an overcoat and bowler hat, ready to shoot the scene. Any hint of that insecurity had entirely gone.”
Guinness’s insecurity existed alongside the confidence to insist the UK’s chief spy dine with him before he accepted the job. And the same stark contrast is at work in Smiley, too. A paunchy, aged cuckold who looks too frail even to leave his chair, he is capable of plumbing the depths of the human psyche and confronting them.
The contradiction within Smiley served as a reminder that human beings are complicated things, and this complexity is the heart of what makes Tinker Tailor one of the best dramas of the TV age. A lot has changed in the years since it was made, but not that.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is now available to buy on Blu-Ray from BBC Studios
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: 40 years on, the labyrinthine thriller is still TV caviar https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/sep/05/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-40-years-on-alec-guinness?CMP=share_btn_tw
In celebration of Geoffrey Burgon’s 78th birthday last week we are presenting the Nunc Dimittus which he wrote for John Irvin’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Television series for the BBC in 1979 making this year it’s 40th anniversary. This work is as popular today as it was then when it received an Ivor Novello Award for the best music score.
Geoffrey Burgon’s 1979 score to Testament of Youth continues to be captivating and memorable, Starring Cheryl Campbell and Emrys James. The new remake with the remarkable Alicia Vikander is also spellbinding and of course needs to be watched.
Thinking of Geoffrey today on his 77th Birthday.
Photo taken on route to America for the Shirtless Stephen And The Children’s Crusade Premiere in New York, 2003.
A Child’s View of Colour World Premiere Transient Glory 92nd Street, New York,
Young People’s Chorus of New York City, Francisco J. Nuñez, conductor.
The text for Shirtless Stephen is a set of poems written for a radio play about the children’s crusade written by Peter Porter in 1974, and broadcast the same year by the BBC. For production, I set the first poem, calling it The Crusader’s March, and wrote several pieces of incidental music. When I was asked to write a piece for The Young People’s Chorus, I realised that the subject matter of this play would be ideal and so I have set the five poems that it contains. The first song tells of the children’s leader and is in the form of a march, The music of the second song is gentler, depiucting an evening on the journey. The march is resumed in the third song and illustates the children’s resolve. The text of the fourth song is a letter of advice from The Virgin to Stephen. ‘Stephen’s Final Resolve’ is the title of the final poen, which begins ‘Where is Jerusalem?’, and ends ‘I shall make death a dream’.
Geoffrey won a Bafta for his score on Longitude.
Longitude was a 2000 TV drama produced by Granada Television and the A&E Network for Channel 4, first broadcast between 2 and 3 January 2000 in the UK on Channel 4 and the US on A&E. It was a dramatisation of the 1995 book of the same title by Dava Sobel. It was written and directed by Charles Sturridge and stars Michael Gambon as clockmaker John Harrison (1693–1776) and Jeremy Irons as horologist Rupert Gould (1890–1948) and Geoffrey Burgon composer (1941-2010).
Geoffrey wrote Goldberg’s Dreams for Bob Cohan’s London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1975. Geoffrey woke up from a dream where he heard Bach’s Goldberg Variations being played in the other room. He had been studying Jung and experimenting with his art combining dreams with reality. It was after this dream that he began this work.
It has a playfulness about it and the humor is in the fact that Bach wrote Goldberg Variations for the Russian ambassador to the electoral court of Saxony, Count Kaiserling, who often stopped in Leipzig and brought there with him the aforementioned Goldberg, in order to have him given musical instruction by Bach. The Count was often ill and had sleepless nights. At such times, Goldberg, who lived in his house, had to spend the night in an antechamber, so as to play for him during his insomnia. …This is one of my favorite dance works by Geoffrey and we found it in the archive on an old cassette.
So here from the dream state of Mr. Burgon, please enjoy Goldberg’s Dream.