Two works for the female voice by Brett Dean are given at the Linbury Theatre, 23 to 29 January 2027.
Brett Dean spent fourteen years as a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic before he left, at thirty-eight, to compose full time. It was an unusual direction of travel and it is audible in the writing, because he knows exactly what an orchestral player will and will not enjoy being asked to do. His Hamlet, for Glyndebourne in 2017, is the most successful new opera of the last twenty years by the plainest measure: other houses have staged it.
The two pieces here are for the female voice and both turn on Elizabethan women — the queen herself and the women around her — territory English music has picked over for four centuries and an Australian composer has no inherited reverence for. Between Hamlet and this, the English early-modern material is territory he keeps returning to from a considerable distance, which tends to produce better results than reverence does.
Ola Ince directs, in the Linbury Theatre from Saturday 23 to Friday 29 January 2027. A week in the Linbury is the Royal Opera’s standard contemporary booking, and January is the emptiest month in the London year, which is when the house puts on the thing it is programming out of conviction rather than need. Ince came out of the Royal Court and directs opera rarely, which is part of the point.