NEW YORK – It’s been a big couple of weeks in the Big Apple for 58-year-old Australian composer Brett Dean. The New York Philharmonic gave the New York premiere of his Cello Concerto on Jan. 30, and the Doric String Quartet presented the U.S. premiere of his String Quartet No. 3, called Hidden Agendas, on Feb. 6.
Although this is his first cello concerto, Dean has previously written several works for solo instruments with orchestra, including concertos for electric violin, piano, and viola (Dean’s own primary instrument). Others have programmatic titles, such as The Siduri Dances with solo flute, a violin work called The Lost Art of Letter Writing, and Ariel’s Music, a clarinet concerto written in tribute to a girl who died of AIDS.
The cello concerto, on the other hand, uses a generic title, a fact that Dean acknowledged in his program notes: “I knew from the onset that this would be the purest of my concertos, focusing on the personality at the front of the orchestra, without any programmatic or spatial theatrics.” That personality was Alban Gerhardt, a 50-year-old German cellist making his NY Phil debut. Gerhardt also played the world premiere with the Sydney Symphony in 2018.
Under the baton of fellow Australian Simone Young – you can read an in-depth interview with her here – the 25-minute work swept across a universe of sound, not to mention a major span of music history. Its five sections were played without breaks.
The initial theme of the first part, “Extremely intimate, yet flowing and playful,” placed Gerhardt’s left hand so high on the A string that he nearly ran out of fingerboard. The orchestra’s atmospheric role included unusual sounds like the crinkling of bubble wrap into microphones. Such moments never sounded like gimmicks; indeed, Dean’s pairing of woodwinds with the bubble wrap was quite effective against the high cello sounds. Another interesting addition, in the slower sections, was Hammond organ, usually associated with R&B and prog rock. Throughout the piece, Dean demonstrated a nuanced and imaginative ear for combining orchestral colors.
The concerto is also a guidebook for the many ways a cello can be used. The col legno (“with the wood”) technique, which usually involves tapping the strings with the back of the bow, was expanded to include a sawing motion that must be rough on the bow’s varnish. In movement III, marked Allegro agitato sempre, Dean applied what he calls “different colorings of the same note,” each pitch repeated in quick succession first on one string and then on another.
At one point, Gerhardt slapped his bow hairs vertically along the strings so fast that it was a blur. The final segment, “Slow, Spacious, and Still,” featured a pattern of rapid fingering similar to harmonics – the left-hand fingers not pressing all the way down to the fingerboard – which was passed from the soloist to the cello section.
For all its originality, the concerto also had moments of recognizable influence, such as a furious motivic conversation among instrumental sections that brought Stravinsky to mind and a lush, late-romantic passage that made the programming of Elgar’s Enigma Variations in the second half seem logical. The program’s opener was Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, which helped highlight a recurring melody in the Dean reminiscent of the “What Harbour Shelters Peace” motive that ends the Britten excerpt.
Gerhardt was master of this challenging and ever-changing material, with only one moment – he had to move from lowest to highest register over and over quickly – causing him any difficulty. Meanwhile, as the tornado of ideas swirled around her, Young maintained her role as center of gravity, keeping control of every thread and fiber to build a cohesive whole. Her collaboration with Dean reaches back long before the Sydney premiere of this work. She can be heard conducting the 2008 recording of Dean’s Viola Concerto with the Sydney Symphony and Dean himself on the solo part.
For all Young’s skill on display during the Dean, she was saving her best for last. The fourteen movements of the Enigma Variations had personalities so distinct that one might think Young knew all of Elgar’s friends that inspired them. And the famous ninth movement, “Nimrod,” blossomed from purest thought into a magnificent cathedral of sound. The Philharmonic players obviously responded to this conductor with everything they had to give.
The same confidence, complexity, and imagination that Dean exhibited in the concerto could also be heard at the U.S. premiere of his String Quartet No. 3, Hidden Agendas, a co-commission by Carnegie Hall. The Doric String Quartet, for whom the piece was composed in 2019, performed in the intimate Weill Recital Hall.
Their program began with a witty, sly reading of Haydn’s Op. 33, No. 2 Quartet, nicknamed Joke, giving the quartet a chance to display its formidable ensemble skills. Although there was some unorthodox rhythmic stretching, especially in the first movement, these choices were quartet-wide and thoroughly rehearsed; there was never a moment when the foursome disagreed on a single detail.
Haydn’s joke was just a warm-up for the grim humor of Dean’s quartet, Hidden Agendas, which the composer described in his notes as “a somewhat oblique, abstract look at certain aspects of the strangely fascinating and invariably unsettling political climate.”
The five movements have programmatic titles, some of which are particularly evocative. The opening “Hubris” has all the furor and self-righteousness of a panel of talking heads on a cable news show. “Self-Censorship” is the distressing title of the fourth movement, ingeniously illustrated by the players wiping their strings with cloths and using unrosined bows. This lack of friction suppressed their sound, and the emotional effect on the listener was desperation to really hear what they had to say.
Dean seems to be focused on cellos recently. Doric’s cellist, John Myerscough, was often the lynchpin that not only held sections together but also allowed one musical idea to move into another. This was true, for example, during the section called “Retreat,” with the cello cutting through the quartet’s long, pulsing chords with cries of pain.
The quartet also gave an impressive performance of Schubert’s final quartet, No. 15 in G major. Except for the oddly thin sound from first violinist Alex Redington, their rendering was intelligent and dramatically convincing, just this edge of wild, yet always perfectly controlled. Second violinist Ying Xue and violist Hélène Clément provided strong, skilled inner voices.
Dean’s busy stretch continues at full speed. Two world premieres are coming up soon in Europe: On Feb. 13 the Swedish Radio Orchestra and conductor David Afkham will inaugurate his Piano Concerto, Gneixendorf Music, A Winter’s Journey, with Jonathan Biss.
And on March 3, his Variation for Rudi on a well-known waltz by Anton Diabelli will be premiered by its dedicatee, pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, at Vienna’s Musikverein.
Anne E. Johnson is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Her arts journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Classical Voice North America, Chicago On the Aisle, and Copper: The Journal of Music and Audio. For many years she taught music history and theory in the Extension Division of Mannes School of Music.
