Lost Art of Letter Writing Etc

I am surprised to see no comment on this excellent hybrid SACD almost 2 years after its release. This (SA)CD records three pieces by Brett Dean, born 23 October 1961 in Brisbane, Australia. I will only comment on the violin concerto, one of my favorite new compositions in this millennium.Brett Dean's violin concerto "Lost Art of Letter Writing" was commissioned by the Cologne Philharmonie and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra for violinist Frank Peter Zimmerman and was premiered in 2007 in Cologne. It is considered by many as Dean's masterpiece. The work consists of four movements. Each begins with an excerpt from a 19th-century letter, by Johannes Brahms, Vincent Van Gogh, Hugo Wolf and Australian outlaw Ned Kelly respectively. The concerto therefore is closely linked to the music tradition of the Romantic Era: There are explicit and inexplicit quotations from music by Brahms and Wolf, but more importantly it combines the brilliant surface material one expects from a 19th-century solo concerto with modern techniques to produce enormous emotional range and depth.As I said elsewhere, I strongly believe that a composer can benefit greatly from her/his own performing experience. From 1985 to 1999, Dean was a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and this must have informed his compositions.(*)The performance and recording in this disc are both excellent. Even though it sounds fine on the 2-channel CD track, I strongly recommend the 5-channel SACD track for best listening experience. For a comparison, the readers can go to "vimeo.com/37065070" to hear (and watch) a different interpretation by Sophie Rowell. (The video is apparently uploaded by the violinist herself.)Very highly recommended.(*) Here lies a lesson for aspiring young composers. IMHO, some modern composers produce "obscure" pieces partly because they have not been on stage night after night, and got the first-hand experience from audience's reaction to see what "works" and what doesn't.-----------------------Note by Brett Dean (personal use only)Not only is letter writing becoming a lost art, but one could argue that handwriting itself is an endangered skill. Aspects of my daughters' education, in particular its heavy reliance on electronic stimuli, have reinforced my view that we are genuinely losing touch with the tactile element of written communication. A recent article in an Australian newspaper points out that the proportion of personal letters amongst the total number of sent articles handled by the national postal authority, Australia Post, has declined from 50% in 1960 to 13% nowadays. Sure, we stay in touch arguably more than ever, via telephone, email and messaging, but that too has undoubtedly changed the nature of communicating.These were then the initiating thoughts behind my Violin Concerto, `The Lost Art of Letter Writing', co-commissioned by the Cologne Philharmonie and the Stockholm Philharmonic for the esteemed soloist Frank Peter Zimmermann, to whom the work is dedicated with my great admiration. Each movement is prefaced by an excerpt from a 19th Century letter of one kind or another, ranging from private love-letter to public manifesto. Each title refers to the place and year the letter was written. The violin plays the alternate roles of both an author and a recipient of letters, but perhaps more importantly, the solo part conjures something of the mood of each of the different letters.The first movement "Hamburg, 1854" refers to one of classical music's great secret romances, that between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann. The music itself relates to aspects of Brahms's own works: the unsettled, 32nd note oscillation in the opening bars, for example, comes from a moment in the slow movement of his Fourth Symphony - an orchestral texture that has always particularly intrigued me. This forms an undulating background upon which the violinist enters the scene as letter writing protagonist, spinning an impassioned and involved missive to an unrequited love. Part of Brahms' early "Variations on a Theme of Schumann" also weaves its way into the movement.The second movement, "The Hague, 1882", is a broad, prayer-like slow movement, and takes its cue from a line from a letter of Vincent van Gogh, reflecting upon the eternal beauty of nature as being a constant in his otherwise troubled and notoriously unstable life.The third movement, "Vienna, 1886", is a brief intermezzo, a fleshing out of a movement from my recent song cycle entitled Wolf-Lieder. It is a setting of an excerpt from one of Hugo Wolf's letters to a close personal friend, again a frank outpouring from a life of affliction.The final movement finds its inspiration in the famous "Jerilderie Letter" of the Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly. Kelly wrote this letter in the small rural town of Jerilderie in 1879 as a public manifesto in order to articulate his pleas of innocence and desire for justice for both his family and other poor Irish settlers in the North-East of Victoria in the days of colonial Australia. Here the music takes on the character of a desperate `moto perpetuo', hurtling through passages of considerable virtuosity, but always reflecting the sense of impending catastrophe inherent in Kelly's famous document.

The first draw of this excellent programme is the Grawemeyer Prize winning "The Lost Art of letter Writing" - a Violin Concerto in all but name. The four movements take as their starting point letters written during the nineteenth century but though the music is both poetic and descriptive it works equally well as absolute music too. The musical language is reminiscent of Berg's Violin Concerto and there are hints of quotes from Brahms in the first movement."Testament", the second work, is based on Beethoven's own testament following diagnosis of his deafness and the work quotes his Razumovsky Quartet. The music for the violas only includes the composer as one of the performers and recalls the musical language of Alfred Schnittke in one of his less capricious works. Short though the work is it carries plenty of expressive weight.The final work in the programme, "Vexations and Devotions" carries on the theme of human communication, or rather the de-humanisation of it. It's a reflection of contemporary social media and communication systems, written for choir, tape, sampling and orchestra. The mood is dark almost throughout with the first movement setting a poem that reflects on the loneliness of living life through watching others on TV. The second has a chilling and increasingly surreal answer phone message as its centre piece with a seemingly more soulful poem sung by the choir in the background. However, both texts end in the same place. The finale sets the banal and chilling texts of company mission statements but ends with a ray of hope from a poem "A Path to your Door" that suggests we are all richer and more complex than the depressingly automated and commercially driven texts that precede it. To me this ray of hope seems like a slight cop out and might have worked better if it had framed the work at beginning and end to provide context to the dark material that dominates the work. For an old fart like me the message of the work pretty well panders to my own vexations making it the most stimulating work in the programme even if the Concerto is arguably the greater work.It's worth noting that BIS provide us with 86 minutes of music. The concerto is played by the Sydney orchestra under Jonathan Nott; "Testament" is performed by the BBC viola players whilst "Vexations and Devotions" is superbly recorded from a live Proms performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson. All in all each work is directly communicative without ever being comfortably listening. This is the second Brett Dean BIS recording I have purchased and they're proving to be a revelation. However many layers Brett Dean employs his orchestration always serves its function and his method serves the message: first class.

Mr. Boyes' excellent review sums this music up very well.The concerto (why not call it that?)is reminiscent of Berg, with a bit of Schoenberg thrown in, and three direct quotes from Brahms 4 in the first movement. Like the Berg (at least for me) it needs a few listenings to see what is going on, but it is a fine piece of music. The rest of the disc is at the very least interesting and unusual, the piece based around the prerecorded telephone answer becoming increasingly chilling. I can recommend the whole cd without reservation.BIS manages to get 86 minutes onto the cd. Why can't the others? A lot of my 2 cd boxes would shrink to 1.

Brett Dean, né en 1961 à Brisbane, est un altiste et compositeur australien.Son concerto pour violon « The lost art of letter writing », créé en 2007 et qui a obtenu un prix Grawemeyer en 2009, s’inspire d’une lettre dans chacun de ses mouvements:Dans le premier mouvement (« Hambourg, 1854 ») il s’agit d’une lettre d’amour, écrire par Brahms à Clara Schumann: le résultat est une musique mystérieuse et fantasque qui gravite autour d’une cellule de quatre notes. Des échos de Brahms, en particulier du second mouvement de la quatrième symphonie, ponctuent le discours musical, sans se faire trop insistants.Dans le second « La Hague, 1882 »), le point de départ est une lettre de Vincent van Gogh à son mentor Anthon van Rappard. Van Gogh y réfléchit sur le contraste entre l’instabilité de sa propre vie et la beauté de la nature : c’est le mouvement lent, aux riches couleurs et à l’ambiance onirique, qui évolue vers un sommet d’intensité, avant de revenir à une ambiance nocturne plus éthérée, mouvement que Dean qualifie de prière.Dans le troisième (« Vienne, 1886 »), Brett Dean part d’une lettre d’Hugo Wolf et poursuit dans la veine du mouvement précédent.Dans le quatrième, « Jerilderie, 1879 », il s’agit cette fois d’une lettre écrite par un hors la loi australien en quête de justice. C’est le Finale, qui commence Agitato, et constitue une sorte de Perpetuum Mobile, plus brutal et joué à perdre haleine.Par son langage, par son souffle, l’œuvre a des airs de famille avec certains des grands concertos du XXème siècle – ceux de Berg, Hartmann, William Schuman. Elle constitue, comme récemment le concerto de Jörg Widmann que défend Christian Tetzlaff Violin Concerto / Insel Der Sirenen / Antiphon , un ajout remarquable au répertoire concertant du violon, bien plus je pense, que, par exemple le « à la manière de » du concerto de Thomas Adès ou le bien peu subtil concerto n°2 de Penderecki.C’est Frank-Peter Zimmermann en personne qui en est le soliste, après en avoir été le créateur et dédicataire. Il est accompagné par l’orchestre de Sidney que dirige Jonathan Nott. Très exposé, le soliste joue avec beaucoup d’engagement, mais aussi de virtuosité et de mordant dans le finale (on l’a entendu exceller dans le premier de Chostakovitch, alors on n’est pas surpris).La seconde œuvre, Testament, a été écrite pour les douze altistes du Philharmonique de Berlin, orchestre auquel Brett Dean a appartenu. Le Testament en question est celui d’Heiligenstadt et le monde sonore fantastique de la pièce est parsemé de citations beethovéniennes (comme celle du 7e Quatuor) : le résultat n’est tout de même pas aussi marquant, aussi intriguant que le Ludwig van de Mauricio Kagel Ludwig Van Beethoven - Mauricio Kagel .« Vexations et dévotions », une ample « Cantate sociologique » en trois parties complète ce programme. Elle est dédiée à la déshumanisation du monde contemporain, mais s’intéressera-t-on pendant le quart d’heure du volet central à des messages enregistrés du type «Toutes nos lignes sont occupées… Désolé de vous faire attendre ». L’écriture chorale a un air de déjà vu (au point qu’on peut en faire un jeu : qu’est-ce que cela vous évoque : le Lutoslawski des 3 poèmes d’Henri Michaux ? Ligeti ? le Penderecki du temps jadis ? le Gloria de Poulenc ?) et le tout est sans doute trop ample pour sa matière assez mince. Cette cantate a ses moments (la 3ème section), mais elle est bien moins séduisante que le Concerto. Belle exécution dirigée par David Roberson, avec le chœur de l’orchestre de la BBC et les « Gondwana voices » (chœur d’enfant australien) vraiment impeccables.Ce disque de plus de 86 minutes (!) est une occasion de de se familiariser avec Brett Dean, et les amateurs de violon contemporain ne voudront pas passer à côté de « The lost Art… » et de la prestation exemplaire de Frank-Peter Zimmermann.Puis-je ajouter que j’aime beaucoup l’idée de la pochette de ce disque Bis réalisé avec soin. Violin Concerto / Insel Der Sirenen / AntiphonLudwig Van Beethoven - Mauricio Kagel