“I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side,” Anthony Burgess wrote in the Economist in 1991. Fat chance of that, especially after the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange . But Burgess kept composing – his lengthy worklist includes everything from recorder sonatas to perhaps the least likely operetta ever, based on Joyce’s Ulysses – and the US conductor Paul Phillips has been championing his music.
This disc starts with Mr WS, a jaunty mock-Tudor ballet suite nodding to Walton’s Shakespearian music, and the similarly Waltonesque Marche pour une Révolution, both dispatched with spirit if not ideal refinement by Phillips’s student orchestra; but keep listening and a more interesting voice emerges in Mr Burgess’s Almanack, a sequence of 14 modernist-inflected short movements for chamber ensemble written in 1987.
