Brett Dean wins Grawemeyer music prize

By -

The Grawemeyer Awards announced yesterday "The Lost Art of Letter Writing", a four movement violin concerto by Australian composer Brett Dean, won the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

“It’s a wonderful solo vehicle that also contains terrific writing for orchestra,” said Marc Satterwhite, a UofL music professor who directs the award. “The piece combines the brilliant surface one might expect from a Romantic era violin concerto with enormous emotional range and depth.”

Each movement in the half-hour concerto begins with an excerpt from a 19th-century letter, with a violin evoking the mood of each letter as it plays the alternate roles of writer and recipient. Authors of the letters include composers Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf, artist Vincent Van Gogh and Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

You can listen to a sample of it here, by Frank Peter Zimmermann and the Münchner Philharmoniker. Dean conducted and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam accompanied when the piece premiered in 2007 in Cologne.

Previously, I reviewed the Scottish Premiered of Dean's Pastoral Symphony and didn't give it very high marks. I have not heard other works from Mr Dean, so don't feel qualified to comment on his style. There is no doubt the music is challenging for the performers. Both his award winning violin concerto and his symphony require virtuoso performances by the orchestra, and probably fairly demanding on the conductors as well.

As with the Pastoral Symphony, there is liberal use of sliding (glissandi) between notes for the strings. The solo violin does a fair amount of double stopped glissandi in the brief segment available on the internet. While I find the technique interesting, it seems bit overdone for me, returning to the styles of Iannis Xenakis. The entire excerpt had that sort of influence. Since Brett Dean is an accomplished viola player, performing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for 15 years, his string writing must certainly be exceptional, extremely technical and yet organic for the instrument. I could not hear the letter it was referring to, nor the entire work, it's really hard to judge the piece as a whole. For what it's worth, the judges obviously felt the piece has merit and so congratulations to Brett Dean for this award.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Role of Music in Opera

By -
There are numerous books on the topic, and every composer, librettist, director, singer and audience member has their opinion as to what role the music should play in an opera. In a play without music, the words ought to support the meaning behind a character's actions. However, in the case of action movies, often times the action is what tells the story and there aren't words, just images to forward the plot. We might hear music to accompany action, build tension, but the action tells the story. Musicals tend to speak until the emotion of the moment just "has" to break out in song - unless it's something like "Mama Mia" where the dialog is the rails we travel on between songs; the songs themselves, written before the concept of the musical, are the focus of the production, while the story is secondary. Operas are a different beast. The music provides emotion to the words spoken, but it also plays the role of ambience when there is only action. In &quo
Read more

Episode 210b: Joyeuse le départ

By -
Image
Podcast:  Play in new window  |  Download Subscribe:  Apple Podcasts  |  Android  |  Google Play  |  Stitcher  |  TuneIn  |  RSS Provost Cunningham has Transmigrated, but to where! What is Dr Sage going to do with his body? And how can she bring home her friends, Abigail and Erasmus, without also bring home Cunningham? What are they going to say when they find the “skeleton” she’s hiding in her closet? Cast: Eddie Louise Clark  as Dr Sage Chip Clark  as Professor Savant Justin Bremer  as the Narrator Emily Riley Piatt  as Abigail Entwhistle, Calypso & Dean Stewart Written by  Eddie Louise Theme music by  Unwoman Sound Design by  Chip Michael
Read more

The Art of String Quartets by Brian Ferneyhough

By -
Image
When an artist sets paint to canvas, there are brush strokes used for different effects. Sometimes those strokes are subtle, imperceptible; they produce works of art like the Mona Lisa . Other times the very obvious nature of the stroke is the art, as in works by Van Gogh. With some composers of music, the notes on the page are their craft. How those notes translate into an aural experience is what defines some composers as great artists. Brian Ferneyhough has a masterful command of the techniques of putting notes on the page. These techniques are sometimes so subtle, even though written in black and white, they escape detection. Some of what he attempts with his music is just that, to escape detection, to bury the framework, diverting the ear away from the structure, so only the music is heard . The subtlety is so fine it is almost imperceptible. Even though he studied at several institutions, he is considered self-taught, studying scores from Boule
Read more