Brett Dean
Composer, Violist and Conductor
ANAM Artistic Director (2006-2010); Guest Faculty (1997-present)
Quite possibly the major defining factor about ANAM, when compared with other tertiary-age music institutions, is its unapologetic emphasis on performance and the path to becoming a performer. The only way to prepare for a life onstage is to perform… a lot! Nothing will stress-test one’s performance skills quite like the real-life experiences of doing just that in concert, again and again. This has been central to ANAM from the outset.
Through my earliest contact as a guest teacher at ANAM in its very beginnings in 1997, I could see it clearly represented a new, important, and perhaps under-appreciated opportunity in this regard for many of the nation’s finest young instrumentalists. The initial focus, however, seemed to be especially weighted towards individual solo performance of a more conventional European kind, like a kind of elite “finishing school” - with firmly set parameters of repertoire and what classical performance ought to entail.
Brett Dean conducts the ANAM Orchestra in rehearsal, September 2009.
In the years since then, under the guidance of some of the most skilled performers and pedagogues from Australia and around the world, ANAM has found a unique, even optimal, mix of combining such significant solo opportunities alongside the indispensable experiences of exploring chamber music, encountering new repertoire, trying out different forms of performance, test-driving one’s musical ideas amongst one’s peers, developing the myriad communication and negotiation skills that ensemble playing requires, and, ultimately and ideally, of confidently sharing the stage with others in an authentic and original manner.
It’s then that you realise that there is no such thing as a “finishing school” in music. A life in music, at its most meaningful, is defined by its constant beginnings and new discoveries.
For many of us who were caught up in the battle to save ANAM back in late 2008, I think it’s hard not to see some of the performances from around that time as amongst the most galvanising and memorable concert experiences imaginable. I have especially strong memories of a pair of concerts directed by two of the many great national and international artists who came to our aid at that time, when we needed them most, and who subsequently helped celebrate ANAM’s secured future by giving memorable performances with our musicians.
Daniel Harding with the ANAM Orchestra, June 2009.
Great British conductor Daniel Harding miraculously fitted three days in Melbourne into his already full calendar to make good on his promise of celebrating with us by directing a fabulous evening with the ANAM Orchestra at the MRC, performing Haydn and Sibelius symphonies, as well as ANAM’s young horn players giving absolutely everything in Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto (June 2009).
And, following a world premiere performance in the first half as soloist in Anthony Pateras’s scintillating Concerto for Electric Violin and Orchestra, Immediata, Richard Tognetti then directed a Beethoven 7 for the ages, with the full force of its turbulence-to-triumph trajectory hitting home memorably at Federation Square (November 2010).
It’s now more than 15 years since I departed ANAM as Artistic Director, and getting close to 20 years since that epic fight to save it. But my encounters with ANAM musicians, both on visits back to Australia and meeting up in places around the world such as London’s Wigmore Hall or backstage at my former home of the Berlin Philharmonie, continue to be a constant joy and a reminder of the confident, “just get out there and do it” culture that ANAM instils in its graduates. They’re more than likely going to be the ones asking questions of our art form, trying out new repertoire, new interpretations, new venues, and leading from the front.
Brett Dean headshot by Bettina Stoes