Brett Dean (b. 1961)
Rooms of Elsinore
And once I played Ophelia, for soprano and strings (2013/2018)
Rooms of Elsinore for viola and piano (2016)
Gertrude Fragments for mezzo-soprano and guitar (2016)
Confessio for bass clarinet (2019)
The Players, Concerto for Accordion (2018-2019)
Jennifer France (soprano), Lotte Betts-Dean (mezzo-soprano)
Andrey Lebedev (guitar), Brett Dean (viola), Juho Pohjonen (piano), Volker Hemken (bass clarinet), James Crabb (accordion)
Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Brett Dean
rec. 2019-2023
BIS BIS-2454 SACD [79]
Australian Brett Dean was a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from 1985-1999. He left in 2000 to pursue a career as a composer and has had a meteoric rise to fame, his works being commissioned and performed by leading players and institutions around the world. The five presented here have developed out of his fascination with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. All grew out of or were research for his opera of the same name which was commissioned by Glyndebourne Opera in 2010. The work garnered rave reviews when premiered in 2017 and has since been presented throughout the world and released on DVD.
And once I played Ophelia for soprano and orchestra was commissioned and premiered in 2013 by the Britten Sinfonia long before the opera was completed. That version was for soprano and string quartet and this version from 2018 uses a string orchestra. It can be seen as a preliminary character study of Ophelia. The libretto arranged by Mathew Jocelyn uses Ophelia’s words for the play but also words directed to her such as the Hamlet’s famous exhortation to Ophelia, “Get thee to a Nunnery”. In the excellent liner notes, the composer tells us that through the five linked movements it attempts to answer the unanswerable question: ‘What remains in our memory after all the Ophelias have played Ophelia?’ The work is astonishing in its virtuosity both for the soloist and the strings. The frantic opening movement begins with those words, delivered in a breathless Sprechstimme that has me worried for the soloist hyper ventilating. She doesn’t of course and is very soon hitting top Ds and E flats in a fantastical, dramatic fashion. Later on, she is asked to reach the Queen of the Night’s high F. It is an extraordinary scena. In movement three when she quietly sings “O shall obey, my lord “, I don’t think I have ever heard anything more heartbreakingly downtrodden. The setting of “There is a willow…. /Grows askant the brook…” is as bleak as a tomb. The theatricality of the writing reminded me of a more restrained David del Tredici in his Alice works and some of the groans and growls I have not heard outside of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. The string writing is, as one might expect, utterly brilliant.
The composer picks up his viola in the next work Rooms of Elsinore for viola and piano which explores the real building in which the events of the play take place. Inspired by a visit to the bleak Kronborg Castle immortalised in the play as Elsinore, the composer describes it as his attempt to “fly a drone” over the play’s supposed setting. Using fragments from the opera which was written by 2016, the listener is led from room to room, from The Dark Gate to The Trumpeter’s Tower. The seven movements were written after the completion of the opera and was in some sense a catharsis for a subject he had lived with for several years. As might be expected, movement five The Queens Chamber is the most disturbing. It is there that Hamlet confronts his mother about her marrying his uncle and it is there he sees his father’s ghost and kills Polonius. So it is a section of the play filled with incident and which Dean encapsulates brilliantly and disturbingly into just under three minutes.
Gertrude Fragments also from 2016 was written for the composer’s daughter mezzo soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, who sings here, with Andrey Lebedev on guitar. Inspired by the Elizabethan lute song tradition it is the most straightforward work on the disc. The restrained nature of the writing works extremely well, as its five short movements explore the guilt-ridden mind of Hamlet’s mother. The performances are exemplary.
King Claudius, who has murdered his brother and married his widow, is a thoroughly reprehensible character in the play but gets off quite lightly in this extended work for bass clarinet. Focussing on Act III Scene 3, set in the chapel where the King confesses his sins with “O, my offense is rank; it smells to heaven”, it is idiomatically written for bass clarinet standing in for the bass baritone of the opera. Confessio is mostly haunted but occasionally desperate as the king tries to escape the dilemma of his own making. I am usually no fan of multiphonics but here they are expertly produced and seem absolutely right.
In the opera, the accordion appears on stage accompanying the play within the play. The composer was very taken with James Crabb’s input into the work and determined to write an extended concerto for him. This is The Players, a twenty-minute concerto with chamber orchestra that revisits the players’ scenes from the first act of the opera. The accordion has seen a resurgence of interest among classical composers, which is largely down to the extraordinary capabilities of players such as James Crabb. In the concerto’s five movements he displays a flawless technique coupled with exceptional musicality. Dean has turned music that in the opera accompanies a play into a highly successful concert piece. Almost inaudible, sinister hums are placed next to animalistic snarls, the unique sound world of the accordion perfectly supported by the impressionistic orchestration and unsettling harmonies. The Swedish Chamber orchestra is magnificent throughout, under the baton of the composer himself.
The disc is beautifully produced, including illuminating liner notes from the composer and full libretti. There are also very helpful links to the performers own websites for those who may wish to explore further.
Paul RW Jackson
Buying this recording via a link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free.
