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Cheltenham Music Festival 2010 (2) - Brett Dean at Cheltenham: a report from Roger Jones (RJ)

The Australian musician Brett Dean, whose full-length opera Bliss is to be performed at the Edinburgh Festival in August, is very much an all-rounder. He is a composer, conductor, and viola virtuoso - and at Cheltenham Music Festival he undertook all three roles. Interest focused especially on his two premieres. Recollections, for chamber ensemble (receiving its UK premiere), was recorded for the BBC Radio 3 programme Discovering Music, and his informative discussion with Sarah Mohr-Pietsch revealed how he had approached its composition.

Dean is very much a cosmopolitan, having played with the Berlin Philharmonic for 14 years, and is a great admirer of Kurtag. This new work is very much in the Kurtag tradition. being a set of six short miniatures, the last of which quotes from a piano piece by Clara Schumann. It explores different aspects of memory and Dean's use of different layers of sound seemed to suit this concept well. The imaginative sounds produced by the different instruments made for a surreal effect, and the musicians of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Ensemble performed with commitment and intelligence under his clear direction.

Though clearly of sound mind himself, Dean appears to have a fascination for composers who succumbed to madness. His Wolf-Lieder, also performed by BCMG, opens and closes with fragments from the Spanish Songbook, while the three more extensive inner movements set extracts from letters and contemporary accounts of his madness plus a poem Als Hugo Wolf die Motten kriegte.  This was an intense and disturbing experience which exposed Wolf''s frailty and the despair to which he was driven. I am not sure whether the ensemble was intended to drown Claire Booth's singing, but doubtless any problems will be rectified when the programme is broadcast late this year.

Prince Carlo Gesualdo of Venosa also went mad - in addition to being a serial murderer.  He is the subject of Brett Dean's Carlo which started out (and concluded) with a tape of disembodied voices singing the madrigal Moro Lasso. A string ensemble then took over for a sequence which alternated between creepiness and frenzy. Deft conducting by Neil Thomson brought out this work's undoubted strengths.

Voices of Angels, Winter Songs, and Demons were also performed at Cheltenham, but the highlight has to be the world premiere of Dean's Epitaphs for string quintet. Commissioned by the Australian String Quartet (and also performed by them with Brett Dean as the second viola), this is intended as a tribute to five of his friends and acquaintances, all of whom died within the space of 18 months. The third, Der Philosoph, in memory of Jan Diesselhorst, a cellist in the Berlin Philharmonic, featured an expansive and moving cello solo. By contrast, Gyorgy Meets the 'Girl Photographer', in memory of the American philanthropist and photographer Betty Freeman who lived to the ripe old age 89, was more a celebration for a life well spent than an outpouring of grief. The final epitaph, Between the Spaces in the Sky, is in memory of the late Richard Hickox, who before his untimely death performed regularly at Cheltenham. Hushed, even reverent at times, this was music that emanated from the heart.

Roger Jones