Composer and violist Brett Dean has been named the new Creative Partner of the Saarbrüken-based Deutsche Radio Philharmonie (DRP). He succeeds the prominent German composer and clarinetist Jörg Widmann.

Working with composers HK Gruber and Martyn Brabbins, long-time colleagues and experts in new music, Dean has designed a program for two weeks of concerts in April 2026 and will also appear as a soloist and chamber musician with the DRP.

Brett Dean. Photo © Bettina Stoess.

The works to be performed include Dean’s 2010 quintet Epitaphs – a five-movement work in which each individual movement commemorates a different person – and his Pastoral Symphony, which takes the sounds of nature and birdsong as its jumping-off point, but also meditates on humanity’s treatment of nature and our disregard for the climate.

Also programmed is Dean’s Viola Concerto (2004). In the concert they will be heard alongside works such as HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!!, Friedrich Cerha’s Wiener Kaleidoskop and the world premiere of Italian composer Pasquale Punzo’s Arcipelaghi insonni.

Dean knows the German music scene extremely well, having served as a violist in the Berliner Philharmoniker for 15 years. Since that time, he has cultivated...