Published: 13 July 2011
Category: Artists

Reviews are in for Brett Dean’s new Sextet, which received its highly successful world premiere at the City of London Festival on 4 July. The work, hailed by the Daily Telegraph as “A masterly achievement”, was performed by co-commissioners the Nash Ensemble and will receive performances in coming seasons by fellow co-commissioners the Australia Ensemble and Eighth Blackbird. Dean’s music has been widely programmed at this year’s City of London Festival as part of a celebration of the music of Australia and New Zealand.

“The new Sextet by Brett Dean, who, after the success of his opera Bliss, must be the best-known living Australian composer. Dean made brilliant use of his unorthodox line-up of string trio with flute, clarinet and percussion. Sometimes he made a clear opposition between the string trio and the others; at others, he blurred the distinctions by getting the musicians to play in unorthodox ways, so you weren’t sure who was making which sound. This is hardly a new technique, but Dean made it seem so in the magical opening, where musical shapes emerged gradually out of dark, inchoate noises. At the end, the music avoided a too-obvious return to this opening, while satisfying at a deeper level our desire for symmetry and closure. In all, a masterly achievement.”
Daily Telegraph

“Brett Dean’s first opera, Bliss, made quite a splash at the Edinburgh Festival last year. Following that, he says he found it difficult to return to writing pure music without a cast and story, but the new sextet hardly shows it. The sound-world Dean has created is entirely personal and never slips from his grasp. Low rumblings on a bass drum and edgy scraping from a violin with a paper clip fixed over one string rouse the music into action and from there it keeps rising in rhythmic energy and falling back again into a pit of primeval noises, each time reinventing itself with new material. It is an evocative work and skilfully crafted.”
Financial Times

“One of the world premieres was the centrepiece of the Nash Ensemble's programme, a beautifully shaped and realised sextet by Brett Dean, who is being featured in the festival as both composer and viola player. The scoring of the new sextet – two winds, two strings, piano and percussion – was specified by the original commission, from the Chicago-based group Eighth Blackbird. A drifting, gradually emerging prelude and postlude full of weirdly wonderful textures and colours frame the substantial central movement, Double Trio, which begins with the wind and percussion and the strings and piano operating as two independent units in a Ligeti-style bundle of counterpoints, though the effect is anything but static and Ligeti-like; as the piece goes on the alliances change, though the idea of the two trios persists throughout.”
The Guardian

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