Brett Dean
Fire Music for orchestra

Narrative imagination, virtuosic instrumentation, and social relevance – these attributes have secured Brett Dean’s expressive compositions a firm place in today’s musical landscape. As a violist, the Australian spent 15 years as a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker before taking the leap into a career as a freelance composer.

Dean has long been preoccupied with the threats facing nature. His birthplace, Brisbane, is surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful coasts, lush rainforest gorges, and green mountains. However, Australia is severely affected by climate change, with an increasing frequency of cyclones and bushfires. On 7 February 2009, Brett Dean was in Melbourne, where temperatures soared to 47 degrees Celsius – “a heat I had never experienced before,” he recalls. On that day, just a few kilometres away, a devastating wildfire broke out and spread rapidly. In this inferno, known as “Black Saturday,” 173 people lost their lives, and an area the size of the Saarland was destroyed. In memory of the victims of this tragedy, Dean composed his orchestral work Fire Music. However, the 30-minute piece is not merely a depiction of disaster. Dean also incorporated the elemental power of fire in indigenous traditions into his concept. Ritualistic and narrative aspects stand side by side: the flames flicker and blaze in a glittering texture before erupting in an explosion. Yet beyond these illustrative moments, the idea of fire also holds spiritual connotations: the imagery of cleansing and rebirth, as seen in Aboriginal ceremonies.

Months after “Black Saturday,” Dean visited friends in the devastated region. “From all the grey ash, green leaves were already reaching upwards again. New life was sprouting from this horror,” he recalls. The audience is immersed in the soundscape: three groups of instruments are positioned around the hall like satellites – a string quartet, with groups of flute, trumpet, and percussion placed opposite each other. They echo the soundscapes of the electronics, interspersed with ominous strikes from the bass drum. Flickering runs in the winds intensify. For Brett Dean, nothing captures the sensation of shimmering heat better than the sound of an electric guitar, whose monolithic solo is answered by the plaintive cry of the flute, like a bird call. Following the brutal intensity of the wall of flames, a lullaby from the string quartet emerges, passing its impulse to the orchestra like a slow ritualistic dance. Yet the fire is far from extinguished…

During his time with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Brett Dean shared his scores with Wolfgang Rihm, the orchestra’s posthumous Composer in Residence this season. “All music is theatre,” Rihm once told him, encouraging Dean to pursue dramatic expression. From the outset, Fire Music was therefore also conceived as a choreographed version for the Australian Ballet.