Brett Dean: Shadow Music

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This superb new release in BIS’s series devoted to Brett Dean takes its name of the longest piece in the collection…like everything here, it’s dispatched with breathtaking ease by the Swedish... — Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2016 More…

Release Date: 29th Jul 2016
Catalogue No: BIS2194
Label: BIS
Length: 64 minutes

Gramophone Magazine

Awards Issue 2016

Editor's Choice

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Dean, B: Etudenfest

Work length10:32

$1.50

$3.85

$5.25

Magnus Sköld
Swedish Chamber Orchestra
Brett Dean
Recorded: May; June 2015
Recording Venue: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden

Dean, B: Shadow Music

Work length22:46

$4.05

$5.20

$7.00

Swedish Chamber Orchestra
Brett Dean
Recorded: May; June 2015
Recording Venue: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden

I. Prelude

Track length13:56

$2.05

$1.30

$1.75

II. Forgotten Garden

Track length2:26

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

III. Voices & Shadows

Track length6:24

$1.00

$2.60

$3.50

Dean, B: Short Stories

Work length17:46

$5.50

$6.50

$8.75

Swedish Chamber Orchestra
Brett Dean
Recorded: May; June 2015
Recording Venue: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden

No. 1, Devotional

Track length7:35

$1.50

$1.30

$1.75

No. 2, Premonitions

Track length2:42

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 3, Embers

Track length1:52

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 4, Komarov's Last Words

Track length2:14

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 5, Arietta

Track length3:23

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Excerpt, Beethoven: String Quartet No. 8 in E minor, Op. 59 No. 2 'Rasumovsky No. 2'

Work length2:00

$1.00

$3.85

$5.25

Swedish Chamber Orchestra
Brett Dean
Recorded: May; June 2015
Recording Venue: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden

II. Adagio molto e mesto (Arr. B. Dean for Flute, Clarinet & String Orchestra)

Track length2:00

$1.00

$3.85

$5.25

Dean, B: Testament (After Beethoven) [Version for Orchestra]

Work length11:39

$2.05

$3.85

$5.25

Swedish Chamber Orchestra
Brett Dean
Recorded: May; June 2015
Recording Venue: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden

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Brett Dean and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra have enjoyed a close and fruitful collaboration for many years, with Dean appearing in the orchestra’s concert pogrammes as composer as well as conductor. Now one of today’s most performed composers of his generation, Dean often draws on literary, political or visual stimuli in his works. Examples of this are his award-winning violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing (recorded on BIS-2016), inspired by four historic letters, as well as his appeal against environmental degradation, the Pastoral Symphony, which Dean conducts on a previous disc with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra (BIS-1576). On the present release, Shadow Music is, according to the composer himself, ‘in no way consciously descriptive’, but in its three movements can be heard realizations in sound of various concepts and definitions of the word shadow, such as ‘dark shape or partial darkness’, ‘the shadow of his former self’ and ‘indistinct, suspect’. The work Short Stories is inspired not by specific texts, but of the literary genre which in a highly condensed form depicts the variety of life. The five brief pieces – the fourth and longest, Komarov’s last words, has a duration of little over three minutes – carry titles which allow the listener to give his own imagination free rein. Testament has a more specific inspiration – Beethoven’s famous ’Heiligenstadt Testament’ in which the composer bemoans his encroaching deafness. Though an imaginative use of the orchestra, including unorthodox playing techniques, Dean simulates the sound of Beethoven’s quill moving over the paper, but lets us also experience his aural hallucinations. The work is here preceded by Dean’s arrangement of the Adagio from Beethoven’s first Razumovsky quartet, composed some four years after the Heiligenstadt crisis. But the disc opens with Etüdenfest, a virtuosic, ironical play with mismatched snippets from standard string methods by such figures as Ševčík and Schradieck. In the work, Dean turns the monotonous and lonely grind of a practising musician into a vibrant shared experience – the étude turns festive.

Reviews

Awards Issue 2016

This superb new release in BIS’s series devoted to Brett Dean takes its name of the longest piece in the collection…like everything here, it’s dispatched with breathtaking ease by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra

October 2016

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure.

Brett Dean: Shadow Music

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