Exhibitions. New writing. Concert commissions. Academic research. Public events, in venues and online. And at the core of everything, preserving and promoting our extensive Anthony Burgess archive.
Your donation to the Burgess Foundation supports our mission to promote the life and work of Anthony Burgess in so many ways.
Burgess’s only completed string quartet is dedicated to the Primavera Quartet, winner of the 1977 Naumberg Award in chamber music. Burgess became acquainted with the Quartet through the award-winning American composer Stanley Silverman who married the Quartet’s principal violinist in 1980. After hearing the quartet, Burgess decided to compose a piece for them and he completed the work on 8 March 1980.
Reminiscent of Shostakovich and early Schoenberg, the quartet proceeds from a somewhat atonal Allegro commodo, through an Adagio interrupted by a lively piu mosso, to a tonal and lyrical Allegro molto.
Two movements from the quartet were performed in 1994, a year after Burgess’s death. The first complete performance was given by the Heath Quartet at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester in June 2014.
A second (incomplete) string quartet by Burgess was discovered in 2023 and performed on 1 December the same year.