This is an extraordinary album, even by Australian composer, violist and conductor Brett Dean’s standards, featuring as it does five works written either as preparatory studies for, during the composition of, or after the completion of, Dean’s opera Hamlet (premiered 2017).

And once I played Ophelia (originally for soprano and string quartet but here arranged for soprano and string orchestra) and Gertrude Fragments for mezzo and guitar are far from mere studies, standing as complete, nay almost perfect, works in themselves. They find the ideal advocates in soprano Jennifer Frances and Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Dean, and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and guitarist Andrey Lebedev, respectively.

Rooms of Elsinore, a seven-movement work for viola and piano and performed here by Dean and pianist Juho Pohjonen, draws directly on material in the opera; indeed, Dean says it is his “personal summary of the intense experience of living and breathing Hamlet for several years”. It is consequently intense, abstractly descriptive and at times ironically rhapsodic.