Composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner is one of the most interesting characters in all of music, from his success with rock band The National to his celebrated compositional career. He discusses inspirations, collaborations and excitement ahead of two weeks with the Sydney Symphony this September.
If you were to compile a list of the most interesting musicians of the 21st century, Bryce Dessner would surely be close to the top. Best-known as a founding member of indie-rock legends The National, Dessner has spent 25 years crafting ten albums of propulsive, arresting and captivating soundscapes alongside his twin brother Aaron and their bandmates.
Perhaps less well-known is that, at the same time, Dessner has built a career as a classical composer that would be the envy of any, working closely with major organisations and individuals including Carnegie Hall, Kronos Quartet, Katia and Marielle Labèque, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and many more besides, writing everything from works for solo instruments to chamber pieces and works for orchestra. Just last year Dessner received his first Academy Award nomination for his score to the film Train Dreams, and was invited to be the Czech Philharmonic’s first-ever Composer in Residence in its 130-year history.
Dessner has also had an especially close relationship with Australia, working with both Sydney Dance Company and the Australian Chamber Orchestra on several projects over the years – but this month marks his first collaboration with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
After waiting so long for the stars to align we wanted to make the most of it, and so we are presenting two unique programs showcasing the full breadth of Dessner’s talents as both composer and instrumentalist. First, an orchestral program featuring the Australian premiere of a brand-new cello concerto, Trembling Earth, together with Dessner as soloist in an older work, St Carolyn by the Sea. A week later we get to experience Dessner at closer quarters, together with a smaller group of our string musicians, performing at City Recital Hall and touring to Melbourne Recital Centre for the first time in many years.
We are not the only ones excited by the duration and breadth of the collaboration.
‘I'm super excited to come and work with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra finally – it’s a big honour’, says Dessner via video call from his home in the south of France. ‘I think Australia is one of the most dynamic cultural landscapes: the audience is incredible, there is very vibrant art scene in many different places. And Sydney being one of the most vibrant – it's just a wonderful place to come perform. I've had the privilege of visiting many times and actually spending quite a bit of time over the years so it's super exciting for me to come down and perform in September.’
‘It’s also wonderful to be able to present pieces of different scale,’ he continues. ‘A couple of large orchestral works and then some more chamber works across the two weeks that I'll be there. It's really an interesting experience for me to have that kind of conversation with the musicians, and to make the music that intuitively comes to me.’
A New Cello Concerto
The centrepiece of Dessner’s trip is Trembling Earth, a brand-new cello concerto which will receive its Australian premiere at the Sydney Opera House on 19 and 20 September.
It was written specifically for Anastasia Kobekina, a firecracker of a young soloist who was recommended to Dessner by both Semyon Bychkov, the legendary chief conductor and artistic director of the Czech Philharmonic, and by Sony Classical, the record label that Dessner and Kobekina share. Kobekina had performed with Bychkov’s wife, the equally feted French pianist Marielle Labèque, for whom (together with her sister Katia) Dessner wrote his Concerto for Two Pianos several years earlier.
‘I met Anastasia in the studio,’ recalls Dessner. ‘Sony recommended Anastasia to play a solo piece of mine called Tuusula for a recent album of mine called Solos. She showed up a couple summers ago, never having met me and played this piece – and it was just unbelievable. We became quite good friends after that and it has developed into a really collaborative, important relationship for me.’
‘She is an unbelievable musician,’ he continues. ‘She is one of the most open-minded musicians and a brilliant virtuoso, but beyond that, she's someone that brings a lot to her music making. It is really quite profound.’
The idea for a concerto came from Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic as part of his residency, but once word got out several other organisations got on board, including Dublin’s National Concert Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and, of course, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
For her part, Kobekina still can’t believe it has all happened, even though she has already performed the piece a handful of times in Dublin, Prague and Berlin before bringing it to Sydney.
‘I love his writing, and his writing for cello is so masterful,’ she says, fizzing with excitement. ‘He already wrote a few pieces for cello, but this is his first cello concerto. He would send me WhatsApp messages with a motif he was thinking about and ask me to improvise on it, and then I would just fiddle around with them. But through the collaboration, through moments that we shared in the studio recording his music, he got to know my style of playing and the way I play cello. And that is so much applied to the piece.
It feels like a perfect suit, like it was tailored for me. It just feels so good to play this music.
Dessner shares Kobekina’s excitement.
‘Anastasia is a young woman who's really empowered, and approaches music with an open heart. That's part of what's been really touching about working with her…But more than [anything] it’s her lyrical playing: she really sings with the cello. That was part of what was new for me with this piece – the concerto has very lyrical passages, which were inspired just by listening to her.’
Inspired by Edvard Munch
One never knows when inspiration will strike, and in the case of this concerto a major catalyst was the artwork of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.
‘The title Trembling Earth actually comes from a painting exhibition I saw in Oslo, at the Edvard Munch museum,’ Dessner reveals. ‘We know Munch from his existential paintings that have become so popular, like The Scream, but most of his output was landscape painting, often without any human forms in there.
‘The paintings in this exhibition were just profound, old oak forests painted in a surrealist way. They were full of beauty, but also angst and poetic imagery. I found it really moving.’
‘I also felt a connection to the times we're living in, which are extremely difficult and traumatic and full of conflict and ominous things. Something about nature bearing witness to human calamity and catastrophe and the end of time. I didn’t necessarily want to write a political work but obviously I'm influenced by the times we’re in.’
Dessner says that he also took inspiration from the very idea of an orchestra itself.
‘The orchestra as this great human archetype that in a way, exists outside of time,’ he says. ‘The sound can feel extremely modern, or very ancient, or of the 19th century, but something about it is timeless and remains – just like landscape painting or Greek tragedy – one of these eternal forms that we never really tire of and that seem to reinvent themselves over time.’
Connection to Other Music in the Concert
One of the great challenges with a new piece of music that nobody has heard yet is what do you perform alongside it? Well, as conductor Umberto Clerici points out, there are some fascinating musical connections between Dessner’s Trembling Earth and the other works in the concert: Dessner’s St Carolyn by the Sea, Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony and György Ligeti’s Concert Românesc (Romanian Concerto).
‘There is a red line running through this concert, which is the connection between us as humans and nature,’ Clerici says. ‘Dvořák wrote this symphony quite late in his life, from his garden, where he found peace and inspiration. So it’s a bucolic euphoria of a symphony: everything is seen through the lens of a composer that looks at the wonder of the world and really is joyful about living in it.
‘Ligeti is similar: he takes all these folk melodies from Transylvania, his homeland. So there is this connection with nature – and of course Bryce’s concerto is called Trembling Earth, which is about the power of what nature is.
‘Then Saint Carolyn by the Sea is inspired by a novel by the famous Beat author Jack Kerouac, called Big Sur, where the protagonist – who is a literal alter-ego of the writer – looks for respite from living in the city and his problem related to alcoholism and mental health.
‘So all the way through there is this leitmotif of what nature is for us as humans. So the prism, the lens is from us. It's not nature in general, it's nature from a human perspective.’
Classical's Connection to Pop and Folk Music
One other intriguing throughline in this concert is the connection to popular music. Dvořák was famous for taking folk tunes from his native Bohemia and transforming them into orchestral music, Ligeti does the same in this early concerto. Of course, we aren’t going to hear quotes from songs by The National in Dessner’s orchestral works, but he acknowledges it’s impossible to completely separate the music that he composes into neat, discrete genres.
I am one musician and it's all part of who I am.
‘Many of the composers I love were great songwriters: Schumann, Schubert or Mahler,’ says Dessner. ‘Dvořák wrote famous American tunes that eventually found their way into American folklore and vice versa. Stravinsky and Bartók are probably the biggest influences on me, and they were deeply indebted to folk music from their countries.
‘I have a mixed background where I grew up playing folk music and eventually started bands with my brother and it's integral to what I do. There aren't tunes in my pieces as far as quotes from rock songs or folk songs or something, but there are maybe certain approaches to the percussion writing or, some of the rhythmic ideas in the string writing. I was really born out of both worlds: I grew up playing flute and learned classical music first, I did advanced studies in classical music at Yale, but then pretty much had bands since I was in my teenage years.’
Another Side of Bryce Dessner
Dessner’s extraordinary range will also be on full display a week later in Bryce Dessner & the Sydney Symphony, which can be heard at City Recital Hall and Melbourne Recital Centre. He will perform works from across his career, each with their own significance and history, alongside the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s string musicians.
Three of the works have a strong connection to Sydney. Aheym and Tenebre were adapted by Rafael Bonachela for the Sydney Dance Company and their Helpmann Award-winning ballet Frame of Mind, while Impermanence was commissioned by the Australian String Quartet and SDC and inspired by the Australian bush fires and the Notre-Dame fire in Paris.
There won’t be any dancers on stage in these performances, though Dessner points out they will be with us in spirit. ‘They weren't written originally for dance, actually – that said, my sister is a dancer and a lot of the first classical pieces I heard were going to the Cincinnati Ballet, and a lot of the early commissions that I had were writing dance scores for my sister. So all of my music feels like it's written for dance in a way.’
Another early influence was the English Renaissance composer John Dowland (c.1563–1626), a renowned lute player and singer; as a young classical guitarist Dessner played a lot of Downland, and his Lachrimae is inspired by a Dowland song of the same name. And Garcia Counterpoint is equally inspired by two major figures in Dessner’s musical life.
‘Garcia Counterpoint is a solo guitar piece that I wrote as a kind of tribute to Steve Reich,’ Dessner reveals. ‘Electric Counterpoint is the electric guitar piece that Reich wrote in the 80s that I played a lot – and I’m touring it with him this year as part of his 90th birthday. Garcia Counterpoint is equal parts tribute to Steve Reich and then Jerry Garcia, the mythological folkloric figure, singer and guitar player of The Grateful Dead who died quite young and was a huge influence on generations of musicians.
‘It is basically my transcriptions of little lines from of his guitar solos, that I then kind of create a collage-like piece in the style of [Reich’s] Electric Counterpoint. It’s two things that kind of don't belong together, but somehow it works.’
Rounding out this journey through Dessner’s career and influences is a selection of music from his score to Train Dreams, which saw him nominated for an Academy Award earlier this year. It is an exquisite film, spare and melancholy and tender, chronicling the life of a man (Joel Edgerton) living and working in America’s northwest in the second half of the 19th century, and Dessner’s score does much to set the tone of the film.
It’s proof that, more than 25 years into a wide-ranging career, Dessner is still growing and exploring what music can be.
