Australian composer and violist Brett Dean has won many prizes for his orchestral and chamber compositions, including the most renowned of them in 2009, the Grawemeyer Award. Today his works are performed all over the world and highly praised for their aplomb and power of expression as well as their ready accessibility to listeners.

The three works featured here were composed between 2003 and 2013 and are all Premiere Recordings. They highlight the empathetic side of Dean: if Eclipse is an evocation of the refugees saved during the ‘Tampa Crisis’, the five movements of Epitaphs are individual obituaries for lost friends of Dean’s. A viola player with the Berlin Philharmonic for fourteen years, Dean joins the Doric String Quartet in the latter, a string quintet with two violas.

In the Second String Quartet, Dean presents Shakespeare’s Ophelia not as a passively suffering victim but as a ‘feistier personality’, full of passion and agility. This is echoed by the great variety of vocal facets required of the soprano here. Young yet already internationally famous and much awarded, Allison Bell will perform next year at Shakespeare’s 400th Anniversary Gala, directed by Simon Callow at the Royal Festival Hall in London.