We’re delighted to present a special concert by Richard Casey of Anthony Burgess’s music for solo piano, played on Burgess’s own Bosendorfer, broadcast from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.

Richard Casey is based in Manchester and has recorded the collected solo piano works of Camden Reeves, Anthony Gilbert (with piano duo partner Ian Buckle), and Peter Maxwell Davies, as well as Edward Cowie’s epic Rutherford’s Lights and Ed Hughes’ Orchids. Richard has also recorded the The Piano Music of of Anthony Burgess for the Divine Art label.

He has played many of Burgess’s chamber works with the ensemble Psappha including the world premiere of his Sonata in G Minor for Violoncello and Piano and his dramatic adaptation of The Waste Land.

Richard says: ‘It is a great privilege to perform some of Anthony Burgess’s piano works. Such clear-sighted economy, fresh and direct, from one of Britain’s most talented composers who, in his words, had the terrible misfortune to be better known as a novelist! A great clockwork contrapuntalist who claimed to write a fugue every day before breakfast. I have put his music with that of three of the composers that inspired him, Beethoven, Debussy and Ravel.’

Richard’s programme (full listing below) includes Six Preludes, a suite for solo piano completed in 1965 and some of Burgess’s earliest surviving compositions. They are characteristic of Burgess’s musical style, including the use of fourths and metrical ambiguity, and also showing the influence of Debussy’s pieces for the instrument. These Preludes were later to provide much of the main material for Burgess’s Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra in Eb (1976). He will also play the quirky and parodic Nine Miniatures; a lullaby dedicated to Burgess’s niece, Wiegenlied; and the programme concludes with Brief Suite for Piano, six movements moving from complex harmonic language to accessible simplicity, with the whole being a light homage to Bach.

This concert will be broadcast on YouTube and Facebook and will be free to view. It will last around an hour.

Programme:
Six Preludes – Burgess
Sonata op. 54 – Beethoven
   In tempo d’un Menuetto
   Allegretto
Nine Miniatures – Burgess
À la manière de…Emmanuel Chabrier – Ravel
À la manière de…Borodine – Ravel
Fuga a 4 Voci – Burgess
Étude pour les agréments – Debussy
Wiegenlied – Burgess
Brief Suite for Piano – Burgess
   Prelude
   Sarabande
   Gigue
   Air
   Fuga
   Gavotte

Watch here (or on Facebook):