Dean: Vexations and Devotions at BBC Proms

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Dean: Vexations and Devotions at BBC Proms

(August 2007)

Dean: Vexations and Devotions at BBC Proms

Brett Dean’s Vexations and Devotions received its European premiere at the BBC Proms on 23 July, providing a refreshing critique of the ‘vexatious banalities’ of modern life.

David Robertson conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus together with the young Australian choir Gondwana Voices. First performed at the 2006 Perth Festival under Matthias Bamert, the work’s German premiere takes place in Stuttgart on 13 March conducted by Andrey Boreyko.

“Brett Dean is rapidly becoming Australia’s best-known composer… His new piece Vexations and Devotions deals with things which on the surface are crushingly banal; the creeping deadness of soul that comes from too much telly, the maddening automated telephone voices that keep you on hold, and the vacuity of corporate mission statements.”
Daily Telegraph

“Thank you for holding,” said the irritating mechanised voice in Brett Dean’s Vexations and Devotions, adding that our holding was important to them, and finally embarking on a hilarious philosophical disquisition on different types of holding. The texts of Dean’s ‘sociological cantata’ by Australian poet Dorothy Porter and cartoonist Michael Leunig articulate some of the intolerable vexations of modern life with bracing wit.
Evening Standard

“… a work that skilfully reveals music’s ability to mock and to mourn simultaneously... The second ‘movement’, Bell and AntiBell, starts with violas buzzing like angry wasps around an almost unbearable crescendo of real and synthesized bell sounds. And then the voiceover, which apologises for being busy, and thanks us for holding. Holding what? The voice takes on a wild life of its own, in psychological speculation, while violin tremolandi, shaken aluminium foil and ticking pizzicato reverberate like wounded nerve endings…”
The Times

Dean continues working towards his new opera Bliss, based on the novel by Peter Carey, to be premiered by Australian Opera. His 25-minute orchestral study for the opera, Moments of Bliss, has been performed in Melbourne, Cologne and Manchester. Dean is currently completing Songs of Joy, a Liverpool Capital of Culture commission to be premiered by Simon Rattle and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in October next year. These songs for baritone and orchestra set texts by the opera’s librettist Amanda Holden intended for Harry Joy, the adman in Carey’s novel who is offered a nightmarish view of his life and family after suffering a heart attack.

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