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Brett Dean
RESIDENT ARTIST PORTRAIT: BRETT DEAN Meurig Bowen introduces the festival’s featured artist – composer, violist and conductor Brett Dean.
As a viola-playing composer Brett Dean is in good company: ˇ Hindemith, Vaughan Williams, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Dvorák, Bridge and Britten were no strangers to the alto clef either – though only Hindemith pursued a parallel professional career. On the possible compositional advantage of being a viola player, Brett Dean once told me: ‘There’s something distinctive about playing inner parts, for sure. It gives you an overview upwards and downwards of what’s going on, of the workings of a piece. Perhaps you’re not as intensely busy as the first violins might be, and you’re not so heavily engaged in pumping out the bass line...so yes, it does give you time to take in other things that are happening around you.’ Dean’s journey with composition started in the late 1980s as an improvising performer, working on experimental film and radio scores in Germany – where he was a member of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1985-99. This initiated an interest in electronics and sampling technology which has featured significantly in subsequent orchestral works, such as the Gesualdo-infused Carlo (1997), the satirically-charged Game Over (2000), or the environmentally-concerned Pastoral Symphony (2001) and Water Music (2004). Dean’s self-acknowledged ‘coming-of-age’ piece was the clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music (1995), a prize winner at the 1999 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. ‘It was very important in those early days,’ Brett recalls, ‘that there were enough people who would say, “Look, this isn’t bad – you should keep doing this”. Then, after the premiere of Ariel’s Music in Brisbane, the Australian composer Richard Mills came up to me and said, “You know, you’re a real composer now”, which was a fantastic, encouraging thing to hear. The subsequent successes of his piano quintet Voices of Angels (1996 – Festival Academy 2, 8 July), Carlo (Festival Academy 1, 7 July), Twelve Angry Men (1996) for 12 cellos, and Beggars and Angels (1999) encouraged a shift of emphasis from performance to composition, as well as a return to his native Australia from Berlin. The superficial extremes of Dean’s musical experience – Berlin’s darkly cerebral centrality to European culture, Australia’s sunny distance from it – generate an important tension in his music. For someone who readily admits to being obsessed with Germanic culture as a teenage student at the Sydney Conservatorium (‘Hesse, Mann, Webern, Death and the Maiden,
all that stuff...’), it isn’t surprising who his musical heroes continue to be, and with which musical aesthetic his own music is most aligned. There is an admiration for such middle European heavyweights as Kurtag, Henze, Lutoslawski and Ligeti, and a tendency to re-create the same brooding intensity in his music that he experienced living in a place like Berlin. But here, the balancing perspective of different cultures asserts itself. ‘I think complexity is great,’ he says. ‘But if a piece is complex from beginning to end it’s not complex, is it? It’s just chaos – which some people might be into. But I think complexity only means something when it’s put against something that isn’t complex. Then you’ve got the gamut of emotions that makes complexity complex. I find it important to write music that invites the listener in, without necessarily making it easy for them. But I tend also to turn off with music that’s so head-driven that it’s slamming the door in my face as soon as I’ve heard five seconds of it. There’s quite a lot of that, particularly from the ‘60s.’ Brett Dean’s decade living back in Australia has more than consolidated those early few years of success as a composer. There have been numerous prestigious commissions from orchestras, promoters and festivals around the world, and further championing of his work by Simon Rattle, no less, with the orchestral works Komarov’s Fall and Songs of Joy. He has written concertos for viola – which he premiered in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2004 – and for violin. This work, The Lost Art of Letter Writing, he conducted at short notice when the sudden illness of Martyn Brabbins’ wife forced my predecessor to withdraw. The 2007 premiere was with soloist Frank Peter Zimmermann and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam – and the concerto subsequently won Brett Dean the coveted Grawemeyer Award in 2009. Earlier this year, Dean’s first opera, Bliss, was premiered to great acclaim at the Sydney Opera House. Based on Australian author Peter Carey’s eponymous novel, and with a libretto by Amanda Holden, the Opera Australia production of Bliss comes to the Edinburgh Festival in early August. With Brett Dean’s intelligence and alert socio-political antennae, certain extra-musical preoccupations have emerged. There have been works about madness and despair: the stringorchestral piece Carlo, based on the tortured life and music of Gesualdo; Testament, for 12 violas, inspired by the self-pitying pathos of Beethoven’s 1802 Heiligenstadt document; and the Wolf-Lieder, an investigation of Hugo Wolf’s dementia.