Dean Knootz

Enjoying great success in music, film, television, and the stage, Dean Martin was less an entertainer than an icon, the eternal essence of cool. A member of the legendary Rat Pack, he lived and died the high life of booze, broads and bright lights, always projecting a sense of utter detachment and serenity; along with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and the other chosen few who breathed the same rarefied air, Martin – highball and cigarette always firmly in hand – embodied the glorious excess of a world long gone, a world without rules or consequences.

Brett Dean is not shy about revealing what his music is ‘about’. Whether inspired by certain individuals (as in Epitaphs), or by an ecological or human disaster (as in his String Quartet No. 1, on the now all too topical plight of refugees), Dean’s works are usually – perhaps invariably – driven by extra-musical narratives. Rather than tease out any innate structural puzzles or tensions, his music typically falls into short little dramatic narratives – no movement on this disc lasts as long as eight minutes, many of them rather less than five. The most obviously successful work here is Quartet No. 2, ‘And once I played Ophelia’, effectively a dramatic scena. Its soprano soloist is no mere extra voice (as in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet) but the leading protagonist. Allison Bell’s genuinely affecting performance is backed by the Doric Quartet’s expressionist scampering and sustained harmonies, the strings occasionally coming to the fore in the manner of a Schumann-style song postlude.

Includes the following albums - Pretty Baby, Sleep Warm, A Winter Romance, This Time I'm Swinging, Dino Italian, Love Songs, Cha Cha Cha De Amour, Free Style, Dino Latino.

A relaxed, easy vocal stylist who clowned with the Rat Pack, developing into an extremely popular ballad singer and light comedian.

Dutch reissue label Disky's Golden Greats series of triple CDs of the works of major pop singers takes advantage of the European copyright law that releases recordings more than 50 years old into the public domain. When it comes to people like Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, that puts a substantial number of the artists' recordings at the label's disposal for no charge. Dean Martin is another story. Something of a late bloomer, he didn't start to take off as a recording artist until 1953, when "That's Amore" became his first gold record. But given that this album was released in 2002, that and Martin's later hits were off-limits to Disky.