Results tagged “brett dean” from Slipped disc

The Australian has just taken note of the death of the nation's leading pianist, Geoffrey Tozer, almost a week after the sad event. But unlike the belated and bone-headed coverage in the Melbourne Age, the national Murdoch paper has got in a proper reaction - from the former prime minister Paul Keating.

Never one to mince words, Keating lays into his country's dumbed values, saying of Tozer:

"Had he been a boneheaded footballer who was biffing fellow players and chasing women down hotel corridors late at night he would have probably had a premium on his career. But to have been among one of a handful of the world's greatest pianists with all of that learning and comprehension was not quite up to it."

This is pretty much what you read here earlier in the week, but coming from a national leader, it stands out as a massive indictment of Australian priorities. Not that it will make any difference.

The writer of the obit recalls that Tozer was to be found at his finest at the national academy of music, ANAM, where he taught and where I met him a couple of years back. Since then ANAM has been shut down by the federal government. In a land that abhors tall poppies, there can be no centre of national excellence.

Advance, Australia fair...

Life has its little ups and downs, but seldom so extreme as the ones that have just hit the composer Brett Dean.

Last month, the Australian government announced it was closing down the National Academy of Music, of which Dean is director. Dean, 47, had given up playing viola in Simon Rattle's Berlin Philharmonic to help raise the next generation of Australian musicians in a so-called 'centre of excellence'. But a new Labour government, suspicious of elitism, abolished ANAM by order of the arts minister, Peter Garrett, a retired rock singer, for a puny saving of less than US $2 million.

Dean was about to fly to Canberra to lead a string quartet protest at Parliament when a call came through this weekend from Louisville, Kentucky, telling him he had been chosen for the 2008 Grawemeyer Award, the richest prize for a contemporary composition, worth more than a year's salary and a torrent of performances.

Dean is a modest sort of bloke. When I gave a talk at ANAM last year he seemed quietly in control and full of good ideas for fast-tracking young Aussies onto the world circuit. He loved the job, not least because it gave him time to compose without having to flog himself to death giving concerts all over the place. 

The piece that won him the prize is called The Lost Art of Letter Writing, and it looks like turning into a very effective piece of political lobbying. Is the austere government of Kevin Rudd going to sack a man who has just put Australia onto the avant-garde map? Stand by for a smart u-turn.