em>Hamlet tends to get under the skin, but it’s a sign of how seriously Brett Dean took his 2010 Glyndebourne commission – the opera Hamlet, first seen in 2017 – that he was writing ‘preparatory character studies’ such as And once I played Ophelia for soprano and orchestra long before getting into the meat of the operatic score.

The piece attempts to answer the unanswerable question: ‘What remains in our memory after all the Ophelias have played Ophelia?’ Listening (perhaps a tad unfairly) next to Hans Abrahamsen’s similarly conceived let me tell you, Dean’s piece has its feet more on the ground. No surprise there, you might say, given Dean’s opera tells an events-based story, emitting its ambiguities like odours. But that doesn’t stop the piece being striking in the extreme, with something of the frantic, pressurised atmosphere of the opera (giving way to loneliness) and its lucidity with words and refreshing confidence in the unequivocal. It gets a more lyrical, fantastical performance from Jennifer France and Dean’s Swedish Chamber Orchestra here than from Allison Bell and the Doric Quartet (Chandos, 10/15), offering the quartet version.

Gertrude Fragments served the same preparatory purpose and throws even more focus on Dean’s clear and lyrical text setting in combining soprano with unobtrusive guitar. This is interesting in relation to compositional craft: how different the music seems to ‘operatic’ music in all its multi-dimensions, and yet how clearly Dean adumbrates the Gertrude he later portrayed with full operatic accoutrement. We hear little unorthodoxies or extended techniques in service of the words and a performance from Lotte Betts-Dean that gets through plenty of gears, illumination and psychological probing (Andrey Lebedev is on guitar). Claudius is represented not by voice but by the woodwind instrument that best approximates a human baritone: bass clarinet. Confessio is a haunted and occasionally desperate soliloquy for the instrument that elaborates the pivotal dilemmas explored by the murdering king in the chapel scene.

Rooms of Elsinore for viola and piano explores the extant building in which this all took place, the castle at Helsingør, north of Copenhagen, that still holds so much of the atmosphere of the play (probably conveyed to Shakespeare by either John Dowland or William Kempe, who both actually worked there). For all its rococo grandeur, the castle is often shrouded in grey externally and creepily empty internally. Dean’s pieces, in all their variety, capture that shadowy emptiness and the larger building’s labyrinthine qualities while also finding in certain corners and corridors the sort of tense, human-focused microclimates that are such a feature of the play.

The febrile atmosphere of Dean’s opera permeates all the pieces here and finds a potent vessel in The Players, a concerto for accordion and orchestra rooted in the ‘play within a play’ portion of the operatic score, which makes telling use of that instrument. It’s always fascinating how Dean reinvents old forms while his compositional turn of phrase (note the work’s ending) and consistently invigorating musical mechanics (second movement, ‘Look, Look! Look where my abridgement comes’, and elsewhere) remind you what a diligent composer he is, an artist who never takes the easy path and appears to consistently re-engineer or retouch to make his music even better. All these works, in emotionally marinated performances mostly involving the composer, offer an awful lot to get your teeth into. But the record might simply send you straight back to Dean’s wise, careful and rampantly imaginative Hamlet (Opus Arte, A/18).