Allison Bell, Doric String Quartet - Brett Dean: Epitaphs / String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2 (2015) CD-Rip

Australian composer and violist Brett Dean has won many prizes for his orchestral and chamber compositions, including the most renowned of them in 2009, the Grawemeyer Award. Today his works are performed all over the world and highly praised for their aplomb and power of expression as well as their ready accessibility to listeners. The three works featured here were composed between 2003 and 2013 and are all Premiere Recordings. They highlight the empathetic side of Dean: if Eclipse is an evocation of the refugees saved during theTampa Crisis, the five movements of Epitaphs are individual obituaries for lost friends of Dean's. A Viola player wiith the Berln Philharmonic for fourteen years, Dean joins the Doric String Quartet in the latter, a string quintet with two violas.

In the Second String Quartet, Dean presents Shakespeare's Ophelia not as a passively suffering victim but as a feistier personality, full of passion and agility. This is echoed by the great variety of vocal facets required of the soprano here. Young yet already internationally famous and much awarded, Allison Bell will perform next year at Shakespeare's 400th Anniversary Gala, directed by Simon Callow at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

It is impossible to talk about the chamber music of the Australian composer Brett Dean without mentioning that he was principal viola of the Berlin Philharmonic. Inevitably he understands string textures from the inside, with compelling results. The excellent Doric Quartet rise to the challenges of these elegiac works. Eclipse (String Quartet No 1), particularly timely, conjures the despair of the boat people rescued from the Indian Ocean by the Norwegian freighter Tampa in 2001, then denied admission to Australia. The three movements flicker between light and dark, turbulence and calm. Five Epitaphs offer moving portraits of five dead friends, including the conductor Richard Hickox. The Quartet No 2, And once I played Ophelia (2013), has a part, too, for soprano (Alison Bell) which began as the seeds of an unwritten Hamlet opera. Tense, tender and original, it's a tough but rewarding listening. -- Observer