“If I’d known that was the first half …”, the man next to me grumbled to his companion, interval drink in hand. Perhaps others in the packed Royal Festival Hall felt similarly as they awaited Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, one of classical music’s most revered monuments. But the enthusiastic response to the world premiere of Brett Dean’s In spe contra spem suggested otherwise.
His new work for two sopranos and orchestra marks the end of the Australian composer’s three-year term as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s composer-in-residence. It might be a dramatic “scena”, Dean’s programme note tells us, or it might be a song cycle – but either way it’s an extract from what he describes as “a planned opera” about Elizabeth I of England and Mary, Queen of Scots. (Watch this space: Dean’s Hamlet, premiered by the LPO at Glyndebourne in 2017, went on to win multiple awards.)
