“Dean´s stock has risen considerably this last decade, and this follow-up to an earlier BIS disc confirms his success as not merely fortuitous. The four works here span the decade of his transition from viola player to composer, underlining both his technical resourcefulness and his environmental concerns. Water Music elides the timbral disparity of saxophone quartet and chamber orchestra with evident finesse — outlining a course in which water as “sound" and “image" is ultimately defined by its “absence". This passing from idealized present to starkly imagined future is realized even more directly in Pastoral Symphony, in which a pervasive use of samples is the active context for a tightly argued discourse on pollution and deforestation — one that is no less musical for its being so graphically represented.

“Siduri Dances is the expansion of an earlier work for solo flute, with Sharon Bezaly encompassing its pivoting between restraint and abandon with her customary poise.  Musically, though, Carlo is a more engrossing listen: a portrait in sound of the late-Renaissance aristocrat composer Carlo Gesualdo, whose life and music Dean rightly considers inseparable.

“Concrete allusions to Gesualdo´s music (via tape) and direct vocal interjections (via sampler) are presented in a continuous process and reveals more through closing in on itself — hence the suffocating climatic chord. This is rendered with powerful immediacy, as is everything else on a disc that, alongsideinfo rmative booklet-notes, can be well recommended to Dean admirers and newcomers alike."

“Recorded in Sweden in 2006 and 2007, this CD showcases works for chamber orchestra written during a 10-year period. Dean's music is strongly atmospheric and texturally imaginative, his considerable technique never on display for its own sake but always subjugated to serve his musical intentions. Throughout this recording, we witness Dean's unerring ear for finely judged, attention-grabbing sonorities and nowhere is this more apparent than in Water Music, a kind of concerto for saxophone quartet and chamber orchestra. The movement titles say it all: Bubbling, Coursing, Parched Earth, these attributes of water, or indeed its absence, caught vividly by Dean. The earliest work here is Carlo (1997), a homage to composer Carlo Gesualdo, who murdered his wife and her lover in 1590. Dean's compelling score has a haunting restlessness and, at times, a sense of deranged anguish as he quotes, distorts and transforms snippets of Gesualdo's madrigals. Pastoral Symphony and The Siduri Dances are virtuosic works, complex and energetic, and receive exciting performances here by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and solo flautist Sharon Bezaly. The Rascher Saxophone Quartet is similarly impressive in Water Music."

The works on this brand new disc tend to confirm Dean´s status as a highly personal composer. He emerges as a composer whose music tackles contemporary issues in purely musical terms rather than in the bluntly polemical ones that one might have expected. For example, Pastoral Symphony and Water Music deal with contemporary concerns such as deforestation and man´s repeated damage to Nature in Pastoral Symphony and the global problem of water supply and lack of it in Water Music. Other works such as Carlo and Testament draw on extra-musical preoccupations such as madness and despair. Other still such as Game Over and Vexations and Devotions reflect on certain debilitating effects of our present-day “civilisation" such as the banality of modern TV and its game and reality shows or of the use of often abstruse jargon alienating the power of speech ....

Performances and recording are first rate from start to end, and Bowen´s detailed andwell- info rmed notes considerably add to one´s appreciation of these often gripping works. ??

‘The Siduri Dances´ ist der Flötistin Sharon Bezaly gewidmet, die auf der vorliegenden Aufnahme auch mit dem Swedish Chamber Orchestra zu hören ist. Dieses Werk wird auch vom Komponisten selbst dirigiert, während das abgeklärte, schlanke Orchester in den drei anderen Werken der CD von HK Gruber geleitet wird. Dieses Werk, eine Umarbeitung des Solostückes ‘Demons´, bezieht sich auf den Namen einer weiblichen Gottheit aus dem Gilgamesch-Epos, und bietet der Solistin einige Möglichkeiten zu glänzen. Stechende Höhen und gesangliche Linien in mittlerer Lage, furioses Gezwitscher und klangschöne Beruhigungen wechseln einander ab. Bezaly ergreift diese Möglichkeiten sämtlich. Mit dem Komponisten am Pult ist hier eine Referenzeinspielung von Rang gelungen.