The contents of this album are novel in a musical context, but for anyone who has visited the print gallery of an art museum, they are likely to seem quite familiar. Just as artists draw or paint preliminary studies before undertaking a major work, composer
Brett Dean
warmed up for his opera
Hamlet
(2016) with shorter vocal and instrumental works that developed ideas for the opera. He called some of them "character studies." They stand admirably on their own, although those who have heard the opera may get more out of certain passages. One of the character studies,
And once I played Ophelia
, opens the program and nicely sets the mood of stressed psychological space that characterizes the whole. These five movements have quite a challenging vocal part, nicely executed here by soprano
Jennifer France
(sample the second movement, "Hushed, Quiet, Mysterious"). There is another character study for
Gertrude
, and the
title work
, with highly original depictions of rooms in the play's Elsinore Castle. The
Confessio for solo bass clarinet
refers to the entrance of Claudius into the castle's chapel and his reflections there. The final
The Players
is a five-minute accordion concerto from the opera's play-within-a-play, a nifty neo-Renaissance piece. The music here deploys a wide variety of instrumental resources but holds together tightly in a way that suggests the high quality of the opera. With crack performances by the
Swedish Chamber Orchestra
, the album earns a place in the long history of music inspired by
Shakespeare
. ~ James Manheim