Educationist and musician Martin Bussey (b1958) is a chameleon composer, able effortlessly to adapt his style to the contours of his chosen poetry: warmly lyrical for Housman’s Blue Remembered Hills; interestingly angular for Yeats’s The Mask; silky soft for Auden’s Lay Your Sleeping Head. The Mask opens the cycle Through a Glass, Darkly, composed for Marcus Farnsworth when he was still a student, and scored for string trio, oboe, bassoon and trumpet. Encompassing works by, among others, Blake, Robert Frost and Byron, this enthralling piece makes a philosophical exploration of dreams and reality, and is beautifully sung by this most mellifluous of baritones. And there is an amusing postscript, in the form of an 18th-century letter… but I won’t spoil the joke.
