Nott, Brabbins, Zimmermann - Dean: The Lost Art Of Letter Writing, Testament (2013)

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Nott, Brabbins, Zimmermann - Dean: The Lost Art Of Letter Writing, Testament (2013)

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More than most composers currently active, Brett Dean uses music to tackle political and social themes of our times. A common factor in the works on this recording is the sometimes problematic aspects of human communication and the erosion and misuse of language. In his violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing, which was awarded the renowned Grawemeyer Award in 2009, Dean strikes a blow for written correspondence, demonstrating how, even today, the art of letter writing, the conveyance of wholly individual mood pictures, is possible. Each of the four movements is prefaced by a quotation from an historical letter, from Brahms to Clara Schumann, from van Gogh to a painter colleague, from Hugo Wolf to his brother-in-law and, finally, from Dean’s compatriot, the outlaw Ned Kelly addressing the Australian government. With a duration of more than 30 minutes the work is a tour-de-force written for Frank Peter Zimmermann, who also performs it here with the eminent support of Sydney Symphony conducted by Jonathan Nott. In the work that follows it, Brett Dean – also a distinguished viola player – makes a guest appearance as part of the viola section of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Testament is also is also inspired by the written word: Beethoven’s famous Heiligenstadt Testament, which he wrote while still in shock following the diagnosis of incurable hearing loss. In the piece, Dean traces the fluctuating emotions in Beethoven’s text, and succeeds in musically interpreting it as a turning point, a move from the deepest despair into one of Beethoven’s most important creative periods. With an exceptional playing time of 86 minutes (!), the disc closes with another large-scale work: Vexations and Devotions. Described by the composer as a ‘sociological cantata’, the three-movement work deals with the dehumanization of society, closely bound up with the loss of language and an increasing sense of alienation. The present recording was made during a public performance of the piece in the framework of the BBC Proms in 2007, with David Robertson conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Australian children’s choir Gondwana Voices.

Composer: Brett Dean
Performer: Frank Peter Zimmermann
Conductor: Jonathan Nott, Martyn Brabbins, David Robertson
Orchestra/Ensemble: Sydney Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra Violas, BBC Symphony Orchestra, …

Reviews: The Lost Art of Letter Writing is Brett Dean's 2007 violin concerto that won the Grawemeyer award for composition two years later. Frank Peter Zimmerman, the violinist who gave the world premiere, plays it quite wonderfully on this first recording.

As with so many of Dean's large-scale works, the score comes with detailed extra-musical underpinning: each of the four movements has a place and date in the 19th century as its title, accompanied by a quotation from a letter written there. The weighty first movement takes its cue from Brahms's 1854 declaration of love to Clara Schumann, the second from a letter that Van Gogh wrote to an artist friend in 1882; the third, from 1886, is from Hugo Wolf to his brother-in-law, while the last, Jerilderie, 1879, is from the outlaw Ned Kelly protesting his innocence. The content of those texts shapes the character of the concerto's four movements, and the first movements is larded with quotations from Brahms, especially from his Fourth Symphony, but none of the music is explicitly illustrative. Like the best works with literary subtexts, The Lost Art of Letter Writing can also be appreciated on its own purely abstract musical terms, and as a wonderfully idiomatic concerto inhabiting a post-Bergian musical world, it's as important an achievement as Dean's earlier Viola Concerto and one of the most significant recent additions to the violin-concerto repertoire.

The concerto is followed by Testament for 12 violas, which Dean wrote in 2002 for his former colleagues in the Berlin Philharmonic. In this work the extra-music element can't be ignored. The testament of the title is Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, while quotations from the first Rasumovsky quartet Op 59 No 1 are woven through the music, so that the imagination and virtuosity of the string writing is almost taken for granted.

The third work here, though, in which the words are explicit, is far less successful. Vexations and Devotions is a large-scale choral work – Dean calls it a "sociological cantata" – involving children's voices and sampled sounds as well as choir and large orchestra; this recording comes from the Proms performance in 2007. Its subject is the dehumanisation of society and the part that language plays in that process, with poems by Dorothy Porter and Michael Leunig framing movements in which the texts are compiled from phone queuing services and corporate mission statements. The music is constantly dragged down by the banality of the texts, though, so that the final assertion of hope for the future just seems contrived.