Not the Stanley Kubrick film soundtrack, which is mostly Beethoven 9th, but the songs that Anthony Burgess wrote for an unstaged musical of his novel. They are going to be performed in Manchester next year to mark the book’s 50th anniversary.

Burgess has fallen out of fashion since his death in 1993. Most of the 33 novels are forgotten and the music he wrote remains unplayed. A book on the novels and the music by Paul Phillips, published last year by Manchester University Press, has hardly been reviewed. Editors with whom I discussed it could barely manage a yawn. Such are the fluctuations of fashion.

But Burgess will be back. He’s a marvellously fluent writer with an unerring rhythmic ear. The opening sentence of Earthly Powers is one of the most enticing in the English language.

See here for more events in the anniversary year.

Two months ago, I reported the death of Vitalij Margulis whose stature among musicians was always miles higher than among media. Since then, I have yet to see an obituary appear in English or German, the two cultures he inhabited in exile (correct me if you’ve seen one).

Just how important a figure he must have been was revealed on the Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3 this week, when the conductor Semyon Bychkov movingly described his role as a pioneer of Russian musicians in exile, ‘the first of us to get a proper job’, a man always willing to share his contact and good fortune with others less fortunate.

Bychkov wanted the world to know of the hope and kindness Margulis shared with hundreds of others. He was a moral guide, said Bychkov in an off-mike comment, almost an archaic exilarch.

Here‘s Mary Kunz Goldman’s report.

With the confidence of well-fed poodles, we snuggled down in  the basket last night to watch the BBC’s 1950s Mad Men tribute, The Hour. It was, as expected, beautifully produced. The costumes walked straight out of V&A showcases, the women smoked with conviction, the walls were tiled by Dutch masters and even the walks were a good imitation of Brighton Rock.

Every leading actor had been puffed in the press for two weeks and expectations were sky-high. Or should that be Sky-high?

And then they opened their mouths.

The language was all wrong. The moment one character said ‘I’m a big fan of yours’, the illusion was shattered. This was not the 1950s but the 2010s making a feeble attempt to sound like the mid-1950s. The more one listened, the wronger it got. Cliché after cliché, pleasantry after unpleasantry, the script reeked of anachronism.

The Hour was supposed to be a thinly-disguised take on the birth of the BBC’s Panorama programme. Not one journalist sounded like the oldies I knew when I came into the profession in the 1970s. This was pastiche crossed with word-search, neither witty nor catty, nor period. It was wrong, wrong, wrong all the way down the hour.

The writer’s credit goes to Abi Morgan. I’m not sure credit is the right word. Morgan’s chief past achievement is the screenplay for Birdsong.

This was a good idea, spoiled for want of a writer’s ear. All that detail, all that expense, and no-one to listen to the language. It would not have cost the BBC much to employ a word-checker, someone who cut the anachronisms from the script and produce a period drama as faultless as Mad Men.

Memo to Mark Thompson: next time, have a good listener on set.

The latest artist to join the informal international boycott of the Brazil Symphony Orchestra is a star bandoneon player from Argentina, the justly celebrated Rodolfo Mederos. His withdrawal is announced in O Globo.

The announcement that Roberto Minczuk has been removed from his post as artistic director, while continuing to plan and conduct most concerts, has done little to attenuate international discomfort with an orchestra that has sacked 33 players after they refused to reaudition.

The players appear to be receiving tacit support from immigration officials, who are refusing visas to foreign musicians that Minczuk tried to hire earlier this year to replace them. I hear  from local musicians that the authorities have also blocked an application for a concertmaster from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra to lead the OSB during a Beethoven cycle conducted next month by Kurt Masur. The status of that cycle must now be in jeopardy.

It is unlikely the boycott will abate until there are changes in the orchestra’s management, together with an acknowledgement that head-on confrontation is no way to improve a performing ensemble.