Brett Dean

Brett Dean is an Australian composer, violist and conductor, born in Brisbane in 1961. After studying in Australia he moved to Germany, and from 1985 to 1999 he played the viola in the Berliner Philharmoniker. He began composing in 1988, at first as an arranger and through improvised work for radio and film projects, and his reputation grew with the ballet One of a Kind for the Nederlands Dans Theater and the clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music. Since 2000 he has worked as a freelance composer. His best-known pieces include Carlo for strings and sampler, which takes the music of Carlo Gesualdo as its starting point, the orchestral work Beggars and Angels, the violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing and the opera Hamlet. Many of his scores respond to literature or to visual art, among it the paintings of his wife, Heather Betts. He continues to perform as a violist and conducts his own music.