Brett Dean

Brett Dean could be called the Greg Norman of Australian concert music: he's well known internationally; well diversified (conducting, performing, directing the Australian National Academy of Music); and well-remunerated – at least, as classical composers go. This year the annual payments started from the Grawemeyer Award, the world's richest prize for music composition (and the violin concerto that won will receive its Australian premiere in Melbourne in November). In March his new opera Bliss opens, based on the novel by Peter Carey.

However, this month the Australian String Quartet will play Dean's Eclipse, written in 2003 in response to the Tampa asylum-seeker crisis in 2001. "It angered me personally," says Dean. "The fates of human beings were being eclipsed by a larger political agenda. These people were all at sea, both literally and metaphorically. It's probably the least tonally centred piece I've written. The music isn't programmatic, but tries to contrast, for example, the hard line attitude of the government of the day with the humanity shown by the Norwegian captain. It has an ambiguous and open ending because the story wasn't over, and indeed it's still going on."

Dean will also join the four girls of the ASQ to play Bruckner's Quintet. "It's one of the few chamber music pieces he wrote," says Dean. "It was written at the height of his career, between his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. It's written on that scale. The slow movement is particularly gorgeous." And how about the women? "They're wonderful. I've been a great fan of [first violinist] Sophie Rowell for many years."

Dean played the viola with the Berlin Philharmonic for 15 years, straddling the batonship of Karajan and Abbado. "I've always loved the colour of the viola's sound," he says. "Plus you have a vantage point from the middle of the orchestra. We're not the flashy show-off types like violinists or sopranos." Indeed, he's relaxed about the stereotypical reputation that violists have as fumbling plodders, happily rattling off jokes such as "Why are viola player's fingers like bolts of lighting? They never hit the same place twice." Go see for yourself and decide whether this champion is just being a modest Australian.

Brett Dean and the ASQ perform at the City Recital Hall on Fri 23 Oct.

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