Julian Anderson: Poetry Nearing Silence: Orchestra

A collection of eight engagingly quirky miniatures from 1997, Julian Anderson’s Poetry Nearing Silence was inspired by the work of artist Tom Phillips.

The highly contrasted, often bizarre juxtapositions of Phillips’s The Heart of a Humument – which sees him ‘treating’ an obscure late Victorian novel by selecting certain words and phrases, and then painting over the rest of each page – are mirrored in vividly imagined music whose pithy energy creates a playful, virtuoso tour de force for all seven instruments.