Locket (version for chamber orchestra)

Program notes

About the Work

Brett Dean, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Composer in Residence this season and a former violist of the orchestra, opens the evening with a short piece about remembering. The orchestra’s programme lists it as Locket, in a version for chamber orchestra, and its introduction to the concert calls it Recollections: Locket, a nostalgic work in which Dean quotes a theme by Clara Schumann.

Recollections is a set of six short movements that Dean wrote in 2006 for an ensemble of eight players: clarinet, horn, percussion, violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano. It was commissioned for the 2006 edition of the festival “Spannungen”, which is held in the power station (Kraftwerk) at Heimbach in Germany, and is dedicated to Lars Vogt and the festival’s musicians. The first performance took place there on 18 June 2006. Locket is the last of the six.

In his own note on the work, Dean says that Recollections is about aspects of memory, and about how fickle and misleading memory can be, making things rosier or bleaker than they were. Each title points to a different kind of reminiscence. Two of the movements, Relic and Locket, stand for older and more distant memories. In Locket he quotes a piano piece by Clara Schumann, which he identifies as a Romanza in A minor, and he describes the quotation as an artefact found beneath a layer of dust, in an attic perhaps, something that carries you back in time.

The choice of this movement suits the programme: Clara Schumann’s music is heard, at one remove, just before her husband’s Cello Concerto. We have found no published description of the chamber orchestra version beyond the orchestra’s own listing, so what follows describes the movement as Dean and its first reviewers present it.

What to Listen For

Listen for the moment when an older music comes into focus. A critic at the first performance wrote that the last movement lets the quotation from Clara Schumann hover behind a veil of new sounds. Her melody is not presented plainly, the way a set of variations would state its theme. It is glimpsed through Dean’s own textures, as a keepsake might be recognised under the dust he mentions.

The title fits that image. A locket holds something small and private from the past, and the music treats its borrowed melody the same way, as something kept and briefly opened.