Reviews
Australian Arts Review - Bill Stephens OAM 5 June 2021
The centrepiece of the 2021 program was the specially commissioned symphony from Brisbane composer, Paul Dean, entitled simply Symphony (2021). In his program notes, Briger claims this symphony as the only full symphony to have been commissioned by an Australian orchestra in recent times, and it’s a beauty.
Confident, challenging, inspired by his love of nature and his concerns of the effects of global warming, Dean has created a spine-tingling work which begins very quietly, with clarinets and flutes positioned around the auditorium creating an enchanting surround-sound evocation of bird calls and forest sounds.
An underlying rhythmic pulse gradually becomes more urgent eventually culminating in a crescendo of discordant sound. Exciting and unnerving at the same time. Again the intense concentration and skill of each musician, confidently guided by Briger through the intricacies and kaleidoscopic orchestral colourisations, was as fascinating to watch as it was to listen to.
The toll being obvious each time Briger paused to wipe the perspiration from his brow between movements. Each movement culminated in an almost frightening primeval screaming, as if expressing frustration at the apparent impossibility of preventing the inevitable.
As the final notes of Symphony (2021) faded away, the small but appreciative audience, aware it had been privy to an extraordinary first performance of a new masterwork, erupted into sustained applause as Briger beckoned the composer to the stage to share the accolades with his orchestra.
Read full review
The centrepiece of the 2021 program was the specially commissioned symphony from Brisbane composer, Paul Dean, entitled simply Symphony (2021). In his program notes, Briger claims this symphony as the only full symphony to have been commissioned by an Australian orchestra in recent times, and it’s a beauty.
Confident, challenging, inspired by his love of nature and his concerns of the effects of global warming, Dean has created a spine-tingling work which begins very quietly, with clarinets and flutes positioned around the auditorium creating an enchanting surround-sound evocation of bird calls and forest sounds.
An underlying rhythmic pulse gradually becomes more urgent eventually culminating in a crescendo of discordant sound. Exciting and unnerving at the same time. Again the intense concentration and skill of each musician, confidently guided by Briger through the intricacies and kaleidoscopic orchestral colourisations, was as fascinating to watch as it was to listen to.
The toll being obvious each time Briger paused to wipe the perspiration from his brow between movements. Each movement culminated in an almost frightening primeval screaming, as if expressing frustration at the apparent impossibility of preventing the inevitable.
As the final notes of Symphony (2021) faded away, the small but appreciative audience, aware it had been privy to an extraordinary first performance of a new masterwork, erupted into sustained applause as Briger beckoned the composer to the stage to share the accolades with his orchestra.
Read full review
Limelight magazine review - Australian World Orchestra 3 June 2021
With a few more musicians added to the forces, it then was the world premiere of Paul Dean’s Symphony, which the orchestra had commissioned for its anniversary.
The four-movement work is not what might be called tuneful, but the harmonic structure is complex, and the piece is as powerful as it is rich, as intense as it is suspenseful, as thought-provoking as it is exhausting.
In an interview with Christopher Lawrence (first published in the May 2021 issue of Limelight), included in the lavish souvenir program booklet, Dean says about his work, “I’m driven by this overwhelming march towards midnight. What are we – 50 seconds or 40 or whatever that number is; arbitrary, but also entirely alarming?”
Paul Dean, Alexander Briger and the Australian World Orchestra, City Recital Hall, Sydney, 2021. Photo © Ken Leanfore
For all that, though, the work cannot be described as programmatic; its intensity – its alarmism – from beginning to end is unrelenting, regardless of tempi or dynamics, and as overwhelming as Dean says about our global environmental challenges.
That said, the front end of Symphony leads the listener into a false sense of the idyllic. Starting with the faintest hint of a whisper, the music suggests the dawn of a new day, punctuated by the most superbly authentic of bird calls – especially magpies – from flutes and clarinets scattered through the audience.
But it is not long before that relentless intensity takes over, with a predominance of triple time and sometimes duple time, as well as more complex rhythms, punctuated by angry, short, sharp stripes of bow on string, blasts from brass or thunder on the large bass drum or tympani.
A special shout-out to the two percussionists, timpanist Antoine Bedewi (BBC Symphony Orchestra Principal) and percussionist, David Montgomery (Queensland Symphony Orchestra Principal). They had major and quite complex roles and delivered on them brilliantly. Timing perfection was required often and mostly achieved, even though they were either side of the orchestra. They added much drama to the intensity of Symphony.
The work is marked by much brooding and darkness, especially in the foreboding second movement, which starts slow and quiet, but with no less intensity than the rest of the piece. As it builds to a huge resolve and then dies away to nothing but a quietly rolling tympani and fading flute, there are wonderfully expansive string sounds, giving way to impossibly quiet woodwinds and brass with bold percussion exclamation marks.
The third and fourth movements return to the freneticism of the first, with a lot going on throughout the orchestra. Divisions get their own passages, and mix it with others, while throughout there is anger and filmic suspense. I thought at one point the work would die away in a sunset much like the dawn at the opening, but it ended with a sit-up-and-take-notice roar.
Symphony would be a challenge for any orchestra, but the AWO’s performance was one that delivered a monumental work with assured precision, extraordinary emotion and explosive power. It is a work that succeeds brilliantly, not only for its music and passion, but also for its message.
Read full review
Sydney Morning Herald, November 17, 2019
We listen to Paul Dean’s A Brief History, a new symphonic exploration of extremes, with our minds full of the universe and our eyes staring into a blazing projected still of a black hole. Dean uses the orchestra like a paint palette, fashioning a sound world both alien and familiar for the ensemble and soloist Jack Liebeck. It is at times dramatic and at others sparse, and ultimately forms a fitting tribute to the great Stephen Hawking.
Read full review
Daily Review, November 19, 2019
A Brief History of Time by Paul Dean (the 2019 MSO composer in residence) had its world premiere as part of the show. Dedicated to Professor Stephen Hawking and led by violinist Jack Liebeck, the piece expressed soaring themes of joy (albeit sometimes bittersweet), wit, tension and even rage as it evoked the idea of illness ravaging the body of one of the world’s greatest minds.
One notable achievement of the evening was the discovery that a piece by a homegrown talent, Paul Dean, could stand proudly in the company of those of Sibelius and Mahler.
Read the full review dailyreview.com.au/brian-cox-a-symphonic-universe-review-hamer-hall-melbourne/?fbclid=IwAR35vGxKCPxBu6SRcMTfg5WNxMZva_jmgnRiXWK_y6CeS3dW7lBb1f5HxnA
Limelight Magazine, April 8 2019
Lovers of the clarinet were treated to a pair of double delights in this concert: not only were there two concertos (one old and one new); but there was also a pair of distinguished clarinettists sharing the stage. Michael Collins, who has a string of excellent recordings to his name, and is known the world over as champion of his instrument, both directed the orchestra and played the solo in Mozart’s perennially popular A-major Concerto (K.622). Paul Dean, arguably Australia’s most well-known exponent of the clarinet, gave the second performance of his brand new concerto, with Collins conducting. To anchor the program in A Major, proceedings came to a close with Beethoven’s Symphony No 7, Op. 92.
Dean’s Concerto is a great contrast to the Mozart. Cast in two movements of four sections each and running for about 25 minutes, it could be described as something of a postmodernist maelstrom. Dean deploys a fairly large orchestra including bass clarinet, contrabassoon and harp, and is not afraid to pit this musical mass against the solo instrument for extended periods.
A brief introduction in which an aria-like clarinet solo contrasts with jagged orchestral surrounds is succeeded by a flowing Scherzetto, only to be supplanted by a spiky Burlesque which was inspired by a dream of the composer standing in front of the MSO. The first movement concludes with an extended Adagio, partly shaped by the recent death of the composer’s mother. It is laden with nostalgia and a languorous melancholy which is intensified by the sustained use of the clarinet’s highest register. Dean favours this register throughout the concerto, particularly at climaxes. Given the instrument’s natural propensity to shrillness at high pitches, such sustained writing puts me in mind of the old dictum that the effectiveness of some things varies in inverse proportion to their use.
The second movement begins with a section entitled “Out of the Blue” whose solid textures give way to a frenetic Waltz inspired by dreams following a performance of Prokofiev’s Cinderella. A cadenza, in this case a truly a soloistic tour de force features lightning changes from low to high registers, giving even the composer a good challenge. A brief, dramatic finale brings the work to an abrupt end. This sudden finish (and what had preceded it) left many of the good burghers of Melbourne’s southern suburbs somewhat stunned, but I daresay the concerto will be taken up and appreciated by intrepid players and audiences further afield.
Read the full review here
Limelight Magazine, September 3, 2018
Dean’s first opera, with libretto by two-time Miles Franklin Award-winning author Rodney Hall and commissioned for the Queensland Conservatorium’s Opera School, is set in Western Queensland on the eve of Federation, and it’s these gender imbalances that form the crux of the work’s drama and tragedy.
The scene is set with a dawn funeral, flies buzzing in the violas as the lights gradually reveal a stark, desert stage – Peter Mumford’s semi-abstract set is raw and open (along with lighting designer Nigel Levings, he gives the work a sharp visual unity), a simple timber platform the only landmark as a dry, clacking ostinato underpins the music. Archie Callaway, an outspoken advocate of Federation, has died, leaving behind his widow Gladys and daughter Veronica. His conservative brother, Reverend Callaway, has arrived in town to claim his half of Archie’s property, Dry River Run. The chorus enters with the hymn O God, Our Help in Ages Past, the European music struggling to assert itself against the wild landscape painted by the orchestra.
Against the backdrop of another struggle – that of pro and anti-Federation sentiment – a more personal story unfolds. Archie’s young employees, Henry and Joseph, are both in love with Veronica, Dry River Run’s architecture echoing that of Janáček’s Jenůfa. The love-triangle doesn’t go un-noticed by Reverend Callaway, who orchestrates a ‘test’ of Veronica’s mettle: the two boundary riders will take her with them on a ride to a remote cabin on the Callaway property – a cabin with a dark history – and leave her there alone.
Dean is perhaps still best known as a clarinettist, but his career as a composer is escalating rapidly – he’s the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Composer in Residence next year – and this ambitious first foray into opera has yielded some wonderful writing, a stirring, tenebrous score shot through with prominent lines for clarinet, bass clarinet, oboe and cor anglais. The student orchestra, under the baton of Nicholas Cleobury, handles the complex music with aplomb: as Veronica sings of butterflies she’s haloed by a glittering swarm from the orchestra, while wry suggestions of hoof beats accompany Joseph and Henry on a lazy ride (astride two wooden barrels in one of the opera’s few lighter moments) and the ensemble charts the escalating drama in cracking orchestral thunder.
Dry River Run adds to a significant canon of operas drawing on Australia’s history – from Richard Mills’ Batavia and Richard Meale’s Voss to more recent works such as Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Rabbits and Deborah Cheetham’s Pecan Summer – holding a mirror up to Australia both at Federation and today. While the tough Gladys Callaway is optimistic, Dry River Run as an opera is less so, painting a grim picture of the future in which the old pre-Federation power structures of church and class simply adapt to the new order, echoes of which resound in contemporary discussions of equality and gendered violence.
More optimistic, however, is the future of Australian opera, both in the hands of the young singers at the Queensland Conservatorium and those of a composer flexing his opera muscles for the first time in an audacious – and I would say ultimately successful – foray into the genre.
Read the full review www.limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/dry-river-run-queensland-conservatorium/
Stage Whispers September 3, 2018
"Paul Dean’s new Australian opera Dry River Run is a powerful and epic piece of theatre. "
"Although it’s set in Colonial times, there’s nothing Colonial about Paul Dean’s music which is atonal, atmospheric, and lyrical. Scored for a full orchestra, his opening with its buzz of flies and butcher bird cries is brilliantly evocative of the outback, whilst his full orchestral bombast to describe the anguish and turmoil the Reverend suffers before the rape is brutally horrific, likewise Veronica’s emotional state post-rape which is realised in adagio balletic form by a group of young women dancers."
"Dry River Run is a masterful addition to the burgeoning canon of new Australian operas. It deserves a long life."
Peter Pinne, Stage Whispers
Read the full review http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/dry-river-run
London Observer July 10 2016
Paul Dean, Trish O'Brien with Igor Kennaway, London
Away from the glitter and glamour of international opera, most of us experience professional music-making at local level, in countless small concerts held in halls and churches all over the country. Sometimes – just sometimes – they can produce miraculous moments of alchemy. When the feathery lightness of Paul Dean’s clarinet joins with the coolly articulated cello of Trish O’Brien and the beautifully judged pianism of Igor Kennaway, musical gold pours forth. Their reading of the Mozart Kegelstatt Trio K498 was a sophisticated delight, an object lesson in playful interaction and sheer good taste. Monumental solemnity came in the form of Elégie Juive and Three Poems by Kennaway’s stepfather Benjamin Frankel, before there was a return to more cheeky fun in Beethoven’s bubbling Clarinet Trio in B flat major, Op 11.
It’s not always necessary to spend heavily on top-priced tickets to hear outstandingly talented musicians. Sometimes, just a few pounds left in a retiring collection can buy you an hour of heaven.
www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/10/il-trovatore-royal-opera-le-nozze-di-figaro-glyndebourne-dean-kennaway-o-brien-review
“the excellent Paul Dean” Sunday Times, London
“…superb clarinet playing and very fine music-making. Recommended” Fanfare (USA)
“Paul Dean … manages to draw out the emotional qualities of the work providing elegant passages of chiaroscuro.” National Business Review (NZ)
“The rich sounds of clarinet and piano are captured with uncommon warmth and presence . . . a master of his instrument” Classical CD Review (US)
“… excellent playing and tonal control by Dean” Otago Daily Times (NZ)
“… superbly played … wonderfully recorded.” Turok’s Choice (US)
“If you seek the best of nineteenth century music for clarinet and piano, look no further.” Music & Vision Daily (UK)
“…outstanding…” New Classics (UK)
“Paul Dean shapes the lovely melodic arches in both works with a sure musical instinct…” The Absolute Sound (US)
“[Paul Dean] deploys his warm, flexible tone with great discernment throughout” The West Australian (Australia)
“…this SACD is a little marvel of which one must also praise the quality presentation.” Opus Haute Définition (France)
“Paul Dean is magnificently accompanied by The Queensland Orchestra.” Res Musica (France)
“Two classic clarinet works from the master … which reach the highest musical standards.” Pittwater Life (Australia)
“. . . two of Australia’s most sensitive and poetic musicians. . . . Highlight: Brahms’ emotional complexity. Otago Daily Times (NZ)
“…the soloist’s performance is of such quality that it is worth hearing on his account…The recording is excellent…” MusicWeb International (UK)
“Paul Dean brings great warmth to his execution of the instrument’s fulsome role in its partnerships with orchestra… Sunday Herald Sun (Australia)
“Paul Dean plays with all the virtuosic style that has won him honours as ‘the most distinguished clarinettist of his… The Courier Mail (Australia)
“In both works Paul Dean demonstrates his exemplary fluency and a stylish, marvellously phrased affinity for Mozart’s… Music and Vision Daily (UK)
“…ideal music for a wet wintry day…It would be difficult to imagine more sympathetic and capable performances” Fine Music (Australia)
“Outstanding, innovative, inspiring…Disc of the Year”Otago Daily Times (NZ)
“…remarkable CD… a sonic tapestry of contemporary Brisbane, as torpid as a summer day, as threatening as a thundershower… Weekend Australian
“…lovingly crafted…magnificent…one to be treasured.” Limelight Magazine
With a few more musicians added to the forces, it then was the world premiere of Paul Dean’s Symphony, which the orchestra had commissioned for its anniversary.
The four-movement work is not what might be called tuneful, but the harmonic structure is complex, and the piece is as powerful as it is rich, as intense as it is suspenseful, as thought-provoking as it is exhausting.
In an interview with Christopher Lawrence (first published in the May 2021 issue of Limelight), included in the lavish souvenir program booklet, Dean says about his work, “I’m driven by this overwhelming march towards midnight. What are we – 50 seconds or 40 or whatever that number is; arbitrary, but also entirely alarming?”
Paul Dean, Alexander Briger and the Australian World Orchestra, City Recital Hall, Sydney, 2021. Photo © Ken Leanfore
For all that, though, the work cannot be described as programmatic; its intensity – its alarmism – from beginning to end is unrelenting, regardless of tempi or dynamics, and as overwhelming as Dean says about our global environmental challenges.
That said, the front end of Symphony leads the listener into a false sense of the idyllic. Starting with the faintest hint of a whisper, the music suggests the dawn of a new day, punctuated by the most superbly authentic of bird calls – especially magpies – from flutes and clarinets scattered through the audience.
But it is not long before that relentless intensity takes over, with a predominance of triple time and sometimes duple time, as well as more complex rhythms, punctuated by angry, short, sharp stripes of bow on string, blasts from brass or thunder on the large bass drum or tympani.
A special shout-out to the two percussionists, timpanist Antoine Bedewi (BBC Symphony Orchestra Principal) and percussionist, David Montgomery (Queensland Symphony Orchestra Principal). They had major and quite complex roles and delivered on them brilliantly. Timing perfection was required often and mostly achieved, even though they were either side of the orchestra. They added much drama to the intensity of Symphony.
The work is marked by much brooding and darkness, especially in the foreboding second movement, which starts slow and quiet, but with no less intensity than the rest of the piece. As it builds to a huge resolve and then dies away to nothing but a quietly rolling tympani and fading flute, there are wonderfully expansive string sounds, giving way to impossibly quiet woodwinds and brass with bold percussion exclamation marks.
The third and fourth movements return to the freneticism of the first, with a lot going on throughout the orchestra. Divisions get their own passages, and mix it with others, while throughout there is anger and filmic suspense. I thought at one point the work would die away in a sunset much like the dawn at the opening, but it ended with a sit-up-and-take-notice roar.
Symphony would be a challenge for any orchestra, but the AWO’s performance was one that delivered a monumental work with assured precision, extraordinary emotion and explosive power. It is a work that succeeds brilliantly, not only for its music and passion, but also for its message.
Read full review
Sydney Morning Herald, November 17, 2019
We listen to Paul Dean’s A Brief History, a new symphonic exploration of extremes, with our minds full of the universe and our eyes staring into a blazing projected still of a black hole. Dean uses the orchestra like a paint palette, fashioning a sound world both alien and familiar for the ensemble and soloist Jack Liebeck. It is at times dramatic and at others sparse, and ultimately forms a fitting tribute to the great Stephen Hawking.
Read full review
Daily Review, November 19, 2019
A Brief History of Time by Paul Dean (the 2019 MSO composer in residence) had its world premiere as part of the show. Dedicated to Professor Stephen Hawking and led by violinist Jack Liebeck, the piece expressed soaring themes of joy (albeit sometimes bittersweet), wit, tension and even rage as it evoked the idea of illness ravaging the body of one of the world’s greatest minds.
One notable achievement of the evening was the discovery that a piece by a homegrown talent, Paul Dean, could stand proudly in the company of those of Sibelius and Mahler.
Read the full review dailyreview.com.au/brian-cox-a-symphonic-universe-review-hamer-hall-melbourne/?fbclid=IwAR35vGxKCPxBu6SRcMTfg5WNxMZva_jmgnRiXWK_y6CeS3dW7lBb1f5HxnA
Limelight Magazine, April 8 2019
Lovers of the clarinet were treated to a pair of double delights in this concert: not only were there two concertos (one old and one new); but there was also a pair of distinguished clarinettists sharing the stage. Michael Collins, who has a string of excellent recordings to his name, and is known the world over as champion of his instrument, both directed the orchestra and played the solo in Mozart’s perennially popular A-major Concerto (K.622). Paul Dean, arguably Australia’s most well-known exponent of the clarinet, gave the second performance of his brand new concerto, with Collins conducting. To anchor the program in A Major, proceedings came to a close with Beethoven’s Symphony No 7, Op. 92.
Dean’s Concerto is a great contrast to the Mozart. Cast in two movements of four sections each and running for about 25 minutes, it could be described as something of a postmodernist maelstrom. Dean deploys a fairly large orchestra including bass clarinet, contrabassoon and harp, and is not afraid to pit this musical mass against the solo instrument for extended periods.
A brief introduction in which an aria-like clarinet solo contrasts with jagged orchestral surrounds is succeeded by a flowing Scherzetto, only to be supplanted by a spiky Burlesque which was inspired by a dream of the composer standing in front of the MSO. The first movement concludes with an extended Adagio, partly shaped by the recent death of the composer’s mother. It is laden with nostalgia and a languorous melancholy which is intensified by the sustained use of the clarinet’s highest register. Dean favours this register throughout the concerto, particularly at climaxes. Given the instrument’s natural propensity to shrillness at high pitches, such sustained writing puts me in mind of the old dictum that the effectiveness of some things varies in inverse proportion to their use.
The second movement begins with a section entitled “Out of the Blue” whose solid textures give way to a frenetic Waltz inspired by dreams following a performance of Prokofiev’s Cinderella. A cadenza, in this case a truly a soloistic tour de force features lightning changes from low to high registers, giving even the composer a good challenge. A brief, dramatic finale brings the work to an abrupt end. This sudden finish (and what had preceded it) left many of the good burghers of Melbourne’s southern suburbs somewhat stunned, but I daresay the concerto will be taken up and appreciated by intrepid players and audiences further afield.
Read the full review here
Limelight Magazine, September 3, 2018
Dean’s first opera, with libretto by two-time Miles Franklin Award-winning author Rodney Hall and commissioned for the Queensland Conservatorium’s Opera School, is set in Western Queensland on the eve of Federation, and it’s these gender imbalances that form the crux of the work’s drama and tragedy.
The scene is set with a dawn funeral, flies buzzing in the violas as the lights gradually reveal a stark, desert stage – Peter Mumford’s semi-abstract set is raw and open (along with lighting designer Nigel Levings, he gives the work a sharp visual unity), a simple timber platform the only landmark as a dry, clacking ostinato underpins the music. Archie Callaway, an outspoken advocate of Federation, has died, leaving behind his widow Gladys and daughter Veronica. His conservative brother, Reverend Callaway, has arrived in town to claim his half of Archie’s property, Dry River Run. The chorus enters with the hymn O God, Our Help in Ages Past, the European music struggling to assert itself against the wild landscape painted by the orchestra.
Against the backdrop of another struggle – that of pro and anti-Federation sentiment – a more personal story unfolds. Archie’s young employees, Henry and Joseph, are both in love with Veronica, Dry River Run’s architecture echoing that of Janáček’s Jenůfa. The love-triangle doesn’t go un-noticed by Reverend Callaway, who orchestrates a ‘test’ of Veronica’s mettle: the two boundary riders will take her with them on a ride to a remote cabin on the Callaway property – a cabin with a dark history – and leave her there alone.
Dean is perhaps still best known as a clarinettist, but his career as a composer is escalating rapidly – he’s the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Composer in Residence next year – and this ambitious first foray into opera has yielded some wonderful writing, a stirring, tenebrous score shot through with prominent lines for clarinet, bass clarinet, oboe and cor anglais. The student orchestra, under the baton of Nicholas Cleobury, handles the complex music with aplomb: as Veronica sings of butterflies she’s haloed by a glittering swarm from the orchestra, while wry suggestions of hoof beats accompany Joseph and Henry on a lazy ride (astride two wooden barrels in one of the opera’s few lighter moments) and the ensemble charts the escalating drama in cracking orchestral thunder.
Dry River Run adds to a significant canon of operas drawing on Australia’s history – from Richard Mills’ Batavia and Richard Meale’s Voss to more recent works such as Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Rabbits and Deborah Cheetham’s Pecan Summer – holding a mirror up to Australia both at Federation and today. While the tough Gladys Callaway is optimistic, Dry River Run as an opera is less so, painting a grim picture of the future in which the old pre-Federation power structures of church and class simply adapt to the new order, echoes of which resound in contemporary discussions of equality and gendered violence.
More optimistic, however, is the future of Australian opera, both in the hands of the young singers at the Queensland Conservatorium and those of a composer flexing his opera muscles for the first time in an audacious – and I would say ultimately successful – foray into the genre.
Read the full review www.limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/dry-river-run-queensland-conservatorium/
Stage Whispers September 3, 2018
"Paul Dean’s new Australian opera Dry River Run is a powerful and epic piece of theatre. "
"Although it’s set in Colonial times, there’s nothing Colonial about Paul Dean’s music which is atonal, atmospheric, and lyrical. Scored for a full orchestra, his opening with its buzz of flies and butcher bird cries is brilliantly evocative of the outback, whilst his full orchestral bombast to describe the anguish and turmoil the Reverend suffers before the rape is brutally horrific, likewise Veronica’s emotional state post-rape which is realised in adagio balletic form by a group of young women dancers."
"Dry River Run is a masterful addition to the burgeoning canon of new Australian operas. It deserves a long life."
Peter Pinne, Stage Whispers
Read the full review http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/dry-river-run
London Observer July 10 2016
Paul Dean, Trish O'Brien with Igor Kennaway, London
Away from the glitter and glamour of international opera, most of us experience professional music-making at local level, in countless small concerts held in halls and churches all over the country. Sometimes – just sometimes – they can produce miraculous moments of alchemy. When the feathery lightness of Paul Dean’s clarinet joins with the coolly articulated cello of Trish O’Brien and the beautifully judged pianism of Igor Kennaway, musical gold pours forth. Their reading of the Mozart Kegelstatt Trio K498 was a sophisticated delight, an object lesson in playful interaction and sheer good taste. Monumental solemnity came in the form of Elégie Juive and Three Poems by Kennaway’s stepfather Benjamin Frankel, before there was a return to more cheeky fun in Beethoven’s bubbling Clarinet Trio in B flat major, Op 11.
It’s not always necessary to spend heavily on top-priced tickets to hear outstandingly talented musicians. Sometimes, just a few pounds left in a retiring collection can buy you an hour of heaven.
www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/10/il-trovatore-royal-opera-le-nozze-di-figaro-glyndebourne-dean-kennaway-o-brien-review
“the excellent Paul Dean” Sunday Times, London
“…superb clarinet playing and very fine music-making. Recommended” Fanfare (USA)
“Paul Dean … manages to draw out the emotional qualities of the work providing elegant passages of chiaroscuro.” National Business Review (NZ)
“The rich sounds of clarinet and piano are captured with uncommon warmth and presence . . . a master of his instrument” Classical CD Review (US)
“… excellent playing and tonal control by Dean” Otago Daily Times (NZ)
“… superbly played … wonderfully recorded.” Turok’s Choice (US)
“If you seek the best of nineteenth century music for clarinet and piano, look no further.” Music & Vision Daily (UK)
“…outstanding…” New Classics (UK)
“Paul Dean shapes the lovely melodic arches in both works with a sure musical instinct…” The Absolute Sound (US)
“[Paul Dean] deploys his warm, flexible tone with great discernment throughout” The West Australian (Australia)
“…this SACD is a little marvel of which one must also praise the quality presentation.” Opus Haute Définition (France)
“Paul Dean is magnificently accompanied by The Queensland Orchestra.” Res Musica (France)
“Two classic clarinet works from the master … which reach the highest musical standards.” Pittwater Life (Australia)
“. . . two of Australia’s most sensitive and poetic musicians. . . . Highlight: Brahms’ emotional complexity. Otago Daily Times (NZ)
“…the soloist’s performance is of such quality that it is worth hearing on his account…The recording is excellent…” MusicWeb International (UK)
“Paul Dean brings great warmth to his execution of the instrument’s fulsome role in its partnerships with orchestra… Sunday Herald Sun (Australia)
“Paul Dean plays with all the virtuosic style that has won him honours as ‘the most distinguished clarinettist of his… The Courier Mail (Australia)
“In both works Paul Dean demonstrates his exemplary fluency and a stylish, marvellously phrased affinity for Mozart’s… Music and Vision Daily (UK)
“…ideal music for a wet wintry day…It would be difficult to imagine more sympathetic and capable performances” Fine Music (Australia)
“Outstanding, innovative, inspiring…Disc of the Year”Otago Daily Times (NZ)
“…remarkable CD… a sonic tapestry of contemporary Brisbane, as torpid as a summer day, as threatening as a thundershower… Weekend Australian
“…lovingly crafted…magnificent…one to be treasured.” Limelight Magazine