Doric String Quartet, Brett Dean, Allison Bell - Brett Dean: Epitaphs & String Quartets (2015) [Hi-Res]

That Brett Dean was a professional viola player for well over a decade only makes his writing for strings the more idiomatic, and this is nowhere more evident than in the three works on this disc. The First Quartet (2003) considers the ever-topical subject of human displacement – the quietly expectant opening movement accumulating tension as it heads into its successor, the ‘Unlikely Flight’ of its title reflected in a predominantly hectic and aggressive manner whose belated calming makes possible the ‘Epilogue’, with its hinting at a distinct yet tenuous hope. The Second Quartet (2014) shares a not dissimilar trajectory, the presence of solo soprano (text by Matthew Jocelyn after Shakespeare’s Hamlet) as she unfolds a portrait of Ophelia resulting in a sequence graphic in its alternation between manic violence and unworldly calm. That same calm comes to the fore in the final two movements, where the vocal fragments are gradually subsumed into an almost motionless quartet texture that ultimately recedes beyond earshot.

Between these pieces (though opening the programme), Epitaphs finds Dean no less adept in writing for string quintet. The title alludes to the memorial nature of the five pieces – each of them inscribed to a specific person. Here the interplay of stasis and dynamism is more clearly defined, culminating in a tribute to the conductor Richard Hickox which draws on elements of its predecessors in an expressively wide-ranging discourse that again disperses into virtual silence. All three works get powerfully immediate readings from the Doric Quartet, continuing its varied schedule for Chandos, with Allison Bell fearless in the Second Quartet’s histrionic writing. Excellent sound, decent annotations and a valuable addition to the Dean discography. ~ Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone