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Brett Dean: Songs of Joy premiered by Simon Rattle

(December 2008)

Songs of Joy, a new work for baritone and orchestra by Grawemeyer-award-winning composer Brett Dean, was premiered under the baton of Simon Rattle on 2 October with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

The three songs are drawn from Dean’s forthcoming opera Bliss, based on the novel by Peter Carey, and were sung in Liverpool by baritone Peter Coleman-Wright who will take the lead role of the adman Harry Joy on stage in Australia, Germany and the UK. Songs of Joy, like Dean’s orchestral work Moments of Bliss, whets the appetite for performances of the complete opera:

“Brett Dean is an Australian composer who is to music what Sidney Nolan is to painting, in that he can create a distinctive Australian landscape that is, at the same time, absolutely his own. The sound is exotic, full of insect life - whining and rasping - the musical weather ominous… These three arresting songs describe a disturbed, psychological landscape… The music also, remarkably, managed to bring out the dark, unsafe humour you find in Carey's novels, and the orchestra was able to convey agitation, menace and a yearning for reprieve. On the evidence of this taster, the opera of which these songs form part should be extraordinary when it opens in Sydney in 2010.”
The Observer

“Dean's songs - eerily atmospheric or punchily sardonic in Kurt Weill style - strike me as the best things he has written. Setting pungent lyrics by Amanda Holden, and superbly sung by the baritone Peter Coleman-Wright, they made me eager to hear the whole opera when it has its premiere in 2010.”
The Times

Photo: Brett Dean with Simon Rattle and Peter Coleman-Wright in Liverpool (Image: Heather Betts)

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