Brett Dean
Composer/Conductor/Viola
“Brett Dean’s is a voice of fertile imagination, originality and expressive subtlety.”
Chicago Tribune, January 2009
Photos |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Robert Piccoli) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Robert Piccoli) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Pawel Kopczynski) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Mark Coulsen) |
Download |
 |
Brett Dean (credit: Mark Coulsen) |
Download |
WORLD PREMIERE OF BRETT DEAN'S BLISS
New opera hits the stage after ten years in the making
Bliss, the much-anticipated new opera by Brett Dean, was premiered on 12 March 2010 at the Sydney Opera House to wide-spread critical acclaim. Commissioned by Opera Australia, Bliss is based on the novel by Peter Carey with a libretto by award-winning writer Amanda Holden (pictured with Brett Dean, right) and directed by Neil Armfield. Peter Coleman-Wright stars as successful businessman Harry Joy, who suffers a heart attack, dies for nine minutes, and following resuscitation finds himself pulled into a series of surreal and nightmarish events which will change his whole outlook on life.
Bliss received a run of six Sydney performances throughout March before moving to Melbourne in April, conducted by Elgar Howarth, one of the most experienced conductors of contemporary opera. Later this year, in September, Opera Australia and the BBC Symphony Orchestra give the European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival (2 & 4 September), before the Hamburg Staatsoper gives the German premiere with a new production.
Opera Australia chief executive Adrian Collette has commented: "This major new commission defines the enterprise of an opera company committed to creativity, renewal and sustaining a vibrant art form now and into the future. Bliss is not to be missed."
Press reviews of Bliss
“Although the project outlasted two musical directors, the company continued to devote considerable resources to bringing the opera to fruition. Was it worth it? The answer is an unequivocal yes. A coalescence of Australian artistic talent has created a compelling opera. Bliss was performed with an assurance and confidence that is rare on any opening night.
Although Dean and his librettist Amanda Holden considered Carey's multi-layered novel an ideal operatic subject, I had my doubts. Dean and Holden confounded my scepticism. Certain strands of the story have been incorporated, and others discarded. It is still recognisably Carey's work but it has been successfully transferred into an operatic context.
Bliss also displays Dean's mastery of orchestral colours. Bluesy muted trumpet and jazzy drum beats greet the arrival of the call-girl Honey Barbara. Disturbing tutti shrieks often accompany moments of high drama.
But Dean employs his orchestration talents for higher purposes. Shades of light and dark match the emotions of the characters. Great care was taken to ensure the text was heard clearly over the multi-hued music.
Bliss is a success in every way..."
The Australian, March 2010
“Brett Dean’s Bliss is a formidable piece of work, compelling at every point. Opera Australia delivers it in an authoritative production by Neil Armfield, under the masterful baton of Elgar Howarth and with a central performance from Peter Coleman-Wright where the singing and acting are seamless and there is an absolute sense of conviction through all the loops and lacunae of this difficult story of madness, betrayal and cancer-inducing commerce, some of it translated into music of searing brutality or banality. Bliss makes the dark glory of Britten’s Peter Grimes seem chocolate box…Brett Dean’s score is very impressive.”
The Spectator, April 2010
"The first standing ovation was for Peter Coleman-Wright's warm, wry, beautifully sung performance in the role of Harry Joy, the advertising tycoon who descends into a modern Dante's hell on realising the extent of his life's dysfunctionality.
The second was for composer Brett Dean and librettist Amanda Holden and was prompted in part by relief that this long-awaited contender for the still-unclaimed crown of ''great Australian opera'' has lived up to expectations, and any sense of duty in supporting something homegrown could give way to genuine enthusiasm.
Bliss is a significant work and unusual in operatic terms for the amount of plot detail that Holden works into the narrative. ...The work holds the attention to the end, sustained by Dean's wonderful score.
To his well-known skills as an orchestral composer, Dean has added an under-utilised empathy for the voice. The sung lines drive the musical and dramatic pace, underscored by beautifully detailed instrumental textures, wrought with an innate feeling for the expressive power of instrumental timbre, watched over by counterpoint and fine motivic workmanship."
Sydney Morning Herald, March 2010
“Indeed, Bliss is more deserving of – and more likely to get – wide currency than any other large-scale contemporary opera of recent years. As befits a black comedy, the music bubbles away energetically. Unlike in many new operas, characterised by meandering parlando and descriptive, film-score effects, Dean's music is the motor that drives the drama. His swirling dissonances find space for keen musical parody, and hard edges are softened by lyrical expansiveness”
The Telegraph, May 2010
"Long live Bliss - a Joy forever…
Brett Dean's score pulses with energy and bristles with invention and clarity. There is special beauty, too, in the elegiac ending, as Harry and Honey sing rapturously of their simple and, indeed, blissful, world. In itself, Bliss can only add joy to the operatic firmament. Long may it live."
The Age, March 2010
Interview with Brett Dean about Bliss
How did you first discover Peter Carey’s Bliss?
I first read Bliss as a student when it was still quite new, in the early eighties. It was a book that I remember struck a chord with not only myself, but also many of my contemporaries, especially fellow music students. The novel heralded a bold, new direction in Australian literature. It woke us out of a period-drama type slumber and threw us into a hellish world that drew from the challenges of our own time.
What made you think it could provide the basis for an opera?
The initial stimulus for an operatic realisation of Bliss came through its combination of personal journey/discovery/redemption, its abundance of colourful, and in some cases, extreme characters, and the book’s fascination with social issues of significance. As the project evolved, however, I realised that its greatest operatic potential lay even more in the strong emotional landscape that lies at the heart of Carey’s tale (in essence, it’s a love story!), and in the book’s structure, with its strong sense of dramatic shape, including scenes of extreme tension, energy, resolution, etc., much like in a piece of music.
Do you view it as a distinctively Australian tale?
Part of the impact the book had on my generation was certainly its local flavour, humour and relevance. But in many ways the central character Harry Joy is an Everyman figure, an innocent in extraordinary circumstances. He stands as symbol for a modern, and not infrequent Western dilemma: at what point does one sell out one’s integrity, health and relationships in favour of commercial expectation, desire and success? Or, in Harry’s case, how do you find your way back…?
How did you collaborate with librettist Amanda Holden on adapting the book into three operatic acts?
From the outset, Amanda and I were very much of the same opinion that, both structurally and emotionally, the pivotal scene of the story occurs in a hotel room, when Harry Joy meets the “pantheist, healer and whore”, Honey Barbara. It followed logically that this would be at the centre of our telling of the story as well, as a stand-alone second act. Hence, the first act concentrates on Harry’s journey from his initial, dramatic heart attack, towards that particular point of spiritual and emotional awakening. The third act, whilst still handling points along Harry’s continuing path towards bliss, also confronts the contrasting downwards spiral experienced by his estranged wife, Betty. These opposing trajectories pull the third act ever more outwards, resulting in an explosive climax.
How does your music set about capturing the nightmarish, surrealist aspects?
I arrived at an important first station five years ago when I wrote the orchestral suite, Moments of Bliss (for Markus Stenz and the Melbourne Symphony). Whilst not straight orchestral interludes in the manner of, say, the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes, the Moments were an attempt to capture four aspects of the story in purely instrumental sound, using a fairly large orchestra including MIDI sounds, electric guitar and extensive percussion section. This provided vital source material for the opera, though I had to reduce the orchestration for the size-challenged pit of the Sydney Opera House!
Being the story of an advertising agent in a highly commercial world in the eighties, Bliss provides plenty of opportunity for sonic colour and reference. So an important part of this earlier project was the opportunity to establish the electronic soundworld I was wanting to create for the final work. Throw in Carey’s further discourses on the nature of heaven and hell, madness, love and death, and all sorts of possibilities await, from an off-stage Dies Irae chorus to a bizarre on-stage restaurant band, complete with a bunch of mad circus artistes getting in on the act. What more could a composer wish for?!
How do you bring Harry’s dysfunctional family and business colleagues to the lyric stage?
As my first opera, it’s been a steep learning curve but I received a lot of guidance and advice on the world of singers and voice types from the late, and much-missed Richard Hickox, who was to conduct the premiere. Getting to know the wonderful singers of Opera Australia over his last few seasons was a joy, and it taught me much. For example, the three main female roles are all sopranos, yet they couldn’t be more different as characters, from the neurotic, dramatic and ultimately tragic Betty Joy, to the reckless naivety yet idealistic concern of her daughter, Lucy, to the ethereal, suggestive beauty of Honey Barbara. Whilst being aware of the extremes of the many colourful characters, it’s been crucial to never lose sight of their humanity and potential, to get to the heart of each of them as much as possible.
What have you discovered about the challenge of achieving comedy in opera?
I’d have to say that if the libretto is strong, the rest follows. Amanda’s libretto terrifically captures Carey’s dark, at times black, humour. And it was great for both of us to consult on local aspects of language with that great man of Australian theatre, Neil Armfield, who will direct the premiere production. In Bliss, the orchestra plays a significant role in the telling of the tale; at times it takes even comic turns. But I guess it’s knowing when to musically take the upper hand, and when to sit back and let it unfold: that is the key to realising both comedy and drama in the opera theatre.
How do you interpret the final line of the opera, that “a life in Hell can still aspire to Bliss”?
There was something intensely autobiographic and deeply personal in the conception of Peter Carey’s novel all those years ago. Having already spent much of his own life in advertising, Carey joined an alternative community called Starlight in a beautiful rainforest area of the Sunshine Coast hinterland, north of Brisbane, in the late ’70s. He had a divorce behind him, was struggling to find his way as a writer, and I think it’s just possible that he was exorcising his own demons in searching for another way to live his life, to find a bliss of his own.
Interview courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes. Interviewed by David Allenby.
Back to Top
MEDIA
As part of the process of composing Bliss, Dean presented some sections of the work in concert form, generating high praise and awareness of the project in development. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra premiered Moments of Bliss, a suite drawn from the opera, in 2004, and in 2008 Peter Coleman-Wright performed the world premiere of Songs of Joy with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
Dean’s vivid depiction of the cardiac arrest of Harry Joy can be heard in this section of Moments of Bliss, performed by the BBC Philharmonic and conducted by Brett Dean:
FURTHER INFORMATION
» Click here to see the publishing information about Bliss on the Boosey & Hawkes website.
» Opera Australia
Back to Top