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Shadow music

CD

Shadow music / Brett Dean ; Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Brett Dean, conductor.

  • Published by BIS Records — 2016 [BIS-2194] — 1 CD (66 min.)
  • Sales Availability: This item may be available to purchase from the Australian Music Centre.
    Please contact our Sales Department to confirm pricing and availability.
  • Library Availability: CD 2797 — Available for loan

$POA

This item may be available to purchase from the Australian Music Centre.
Please contact our Sales Department to confirm pricing and availability.

Featured Australian works

  Work Composer PerformersDuration
Etüdenfest (2000) for string orchestra
Recorded/performed at: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden, on 2015.
Brett Dean Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Magnus Sköld, Brett Dean 10 mins, 30 sec.
Shadow music (2002) for small orchestra
Recorded/performed at: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden, on 2015.
Brett Dean Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Brett Dean 16 mins, 22 sec.
Short Stories (2005) five interludes for string orchestra
Recorded/performed at: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden, on 2015.
Brett Dean Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Brett Dean 12 mins, 7 sec.
Testament (2008) music for orchestra
Recorded/performed at: Concert Hall of the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro, Sweden, on 2015.
Brett Dean Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Brett Dean 13 mins, 56 sec.

Also includes: Adagio Molto e Mesto, from String quartet in F major, op. 59 no. 1 (Razumovsky), by Beethoven, arranged Brett Dean, for flute, clarinet and string orchestra.

Product details

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.

Duration: 66 min.

Liner notes include programme notes.


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