Meet featured composer Brett Dean

Born and educated in Brisbane, Brett Dean attracted attention in Australia as an orchestral musician. He moved to Germany in the 1980s and spent 14 years as a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic. Dean began to compose in 1988. In a 2011 interview on music publisher Boosey & Hawkes’s website, Dean explained: “I think my early apprenticeship — working in electronic music studios and live improv clubs in Berlin in the late ’ 80s — was the ideal counterbalance to any potential infl uence my ‘ day job’ with the Berlin Philharmonic might have had on the originality ( or otherwise) of my own compositions. … These early experiences helped keep my ears open to sound in any form as a possible compositional source. The orchestral years taught me about shape, breath, gesture, energy, whereas improvising and playing around with embryonic ideas in a studio allowed me to discover my own way of handling musical material. … Electronic sound … it is a colour palette that knows no bounds and has always been an important tool for me to stretch the possibilities of my own sonic world.” The last three decades have see n Dean create a instrumental repertoire, inspired by literary sources or the paintings of his wife Heather Betts. At the turn of the century he returned to Australia for a stint as artistic director of Melbourne’s Australian National Academy of Music. Dean has been performed by some very big names — he premiered his 2004 Viola Concerto with superstar Sir Simon Rattle conducting — and his reputation continues to grow. He is currently Composer in Residence at the Grafenegg Festival in Austria.