In the Mirror of Time

Brett Dean: Intimate Decisions for solo viola
L. van Beethoven: String Quartet in F major, Op. 59 No. 1, 3rd movement (arr. B. Dean)
Brett Dean: Short Stories – Five Interludes for String Orchestra
L. van Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major (arr. for piano and strings)

To round off the season, the spotlight turns to Brett Dean, a composer who combines contemporary writing for strings with an engagement with tradition in a unique way.

The programme opens with *Intimate Decisions* for solo viola. This short piece feels like a concentrated monologue: intimate, searching, entirely focused on the individual sound and its transformations. Even here, a compositional approach is evident that builds tension from the smallest of gestures.
This engagement with tradition comes to the fore in his arrangement of the third movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 59 No. 1. Dean transposes the quartet music to a larger string ensemble without smoothing over its inner drive. Beethoven remains recognisable, yet appears in a new light.

Dean’s *Short Stories. Five Interludes for String Orchestra* take this idea further. Each of these five pieces has its own character, its own movement, its own sonic context. Together, they do not form a cohesive narrative, but rather a sequence of moments in which the string orchestra reveals itself in ever-changing ways.

The programme concludes with Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in a version for piano and strings. It is precisely in this reduced instrumentation that the subtlety of this work comes to the fore particularly clearly. The dialogue between the solo instrument and the ensemble feels more immediate, more transparent, more like chamber music. Thus, one of Beethoven’s great piano concertos appears not as a monumental capstone, but as music of great inner agility.