Brett Dean’s residency return to Berlin Philharmonic
Brett Dean is Composer in Residence across the coming season with the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra where he was violist for 14 years. His return brings two new commissions, multiple roles as composer, instrumentalist and mentor for young musicians at the Karajan Academy, and his conducting debut with the orchestra.
The Berlin Philharmonic welcomes Brett Dean back to the orchestra as its Composer in Residence for the 2026/27 season, 25 years after the composer departed following 14 years as violist with the orchestra. This return brings two major new scores commissioned for premiere during the residency: Conversations with Schumann for soprano and orchestra, and Phantoms: Scenes for Orchestra(s) with the live Berlin Philharmonic playing against an electronic phantom version of itself. Dean’s music is featured in 11 concerts across the season, seeing him in multiple roles as composer, conductor, instrumentalist in chamber music and as mentor for young musicians in the orchestra’s Karajan Academy.
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Brett Dean makes his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in the opening programme of the residency, combining his own music with Debussy, at the Philharmonie on 10-12 September as part of Musikfest Berlin. Jennifer France is soprano soloist in the world premiere of Dean’s new Conversations with Schumann and in his Hamlet-inspired And once I Played Ophelia in its string orchestra version. Robert Schumann is one of Dean's central composers and Conversations with Schumann takes as its starting point Schumann’s alter-egos Florestan and Eusebius. Motifs from Fantasiestücke, Davidsbündlertänze and Waldszenen are absorbed in Dean’s score and its final movement is a transcription of Schumann's song Herzeleid from his op. 107 set. The programme is completed with Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie in the orchestration by Colin Matthews, and Dean’s Beggars and Angels, one of his most successful early works inspired by sculptures of Trak Wendisch and paintings by Heather Betts.
As Dean notes in an interview with the Berlin Philharmonic, “conducting the orchestra is a very particular challenge. And I’ll be the first to admit that if they’d come to me with a standard Philharmonic programme, I would have said, thanks, guys, but I think you need a professional for that. However, a programme that’s built very much around my voice as a composer and pieces of mine that I have conducted before – I feel that’s something I really can share with the orchestra with a great degree of authority.”
The second Dean commission, Phantoms: Scenes for Orchestra(s), is an ambitious sonic and spatial composition premiered in a programme conducted by Sakari Oramo on 12-14 February. The composer has collaborated with Bob Scott, who is recording an electronic double of the orchestra, creating the sound design concept, and is directing the live sound projection at the premiere in the Philharmonie. Dean and Scott’s aim is to achieve the illusion of a concerto for two orchestras, one live, the other a ‘phantom’. Multiple speakers (and some live players) will be placed around the legendary vineyard-shaped concert hall, giving as complete a sonic enveloping of the space and as multi-directional an interplay with the live orchestra as possible. Phantoms is comprised of four sections, each of which, in the spirit of a ‘concerto for orchestra’, focuses to a degree on a different instrumental ‘family’ of instruments within the orchestra.
A late night chamber programme on 19 September includes Dean’s Imaginary Ballet, partnered by works of Cathy Milliken and Schumann, with the composer appearing as violist. A concert on 11 April includes Dean’s Dream Sequence and Epitaphs, together with music by Korngold, Beethoven and Kurtág, featuring players from the Karajan Academy under the composer’s baton. The residency ends on 17-19 June with Dean’s violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing, in a programme conducted by Alan Gilbert. Isabelle Faust is soloist in Berlin following performances of the concerto with the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra on 5 February and the London Symphony Orchestra on 11 February.
This autumn brings further dates for Dean’s new opera Of One Blood at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich on 3, 8 and 11 October in the acclaimed production by Claus Guth conducted by Markus Stenz. New Year 2027 brings a new Brett Dean music theatre work, Good Sometimes Queen, with six performances at The Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre in London between 23 and 29 January. The 50-minute score, staged by Ola Ince, combines two Dean song cycles with texts by Matthew Jocelyn: Madame ma bonne Soeur and And once I played Ophelia.
> Further information on Work: Conversations with Schumann
Photo: Berliner Philharmoniker