Brett Dean here conducts a selection of his own works that highlights the
restless imagination and sheer rightness of his string writing. Etüdenfest is a teeming showpiece drawn from the kind of finger-numbing studies every serious string student will know and dread – tongue-in-cheek, but only just. The five Short Stories exploit string possibilities to the full, as you might expect from a composer who used to play viola in the Berlin Philharmonic. These are for strings only; elsewhere we hear the rest of the excellent Swedish Chamber Orchestra too. The three movements of Shadow Music take us through different kinds of darkness, ending up in a dimly glittering, menacing fairyland. Finally, Dean’s own arrangement of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Quartet Op 59 No 2 leads into Testament, in which he imagines Beethoven scribbling away at the famous letter in which he confronted his encroaching deafness. It’s a disc of uneasy but engaging music.
