New Album "Transitions"
When the world shut down in 2020, I found myself dreaming about a recording project that would showcase composers that are dear to me, and capture what it felt like to be removed from everything.Read more
With his debut solo album Transitions, violist Jesse Morrison steps forward with a voice both intimate
and far reaching, offering a portrait of the viola as a living, breathing storyteller. The title reflects more
than technical change. It speaks to emotional passage, stylistic contrast, and the instrument’s rare
ability to inhabit multiple eras at once. Across this program, the viola becomes a shape shifter, moving
through tenderness and volatility, solitude and urgency. Morrison’s playing reveals a deep respect for
the instrument’s natural gravity while allowing its expressive spectrum to unfold with clarity, patience,
and purpose.
The album begins with a newly commissioned work, Partita for Solo Viola by composer Derek David,
written in reverence to the unaccompanied masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather than
imitation, David offers conversation. His Partita draws on personal experiences shaped by friendship,
love, devotion, alienation, longing, mental illness, and tragedy during a specific period of his life.
These emotional states are translated into music of striking intimacy, where lyricism and fracture
coexist. Morrison guides the listener through this landscape with unforced authority, allowing each
movement to breathe, to question, and ultimately to resolve in its own quiet eloquence.
The album also presents the debut recording of Brett Dean’s Skizzen für Siegbert (2011). Premiered in
Berlin in 2012 as the compulsory piece for the Max Rostal Viola Competition, the composition frames
reflection around velocity. The outer movements, contemplative and mournful in character, therefore
frame a central virtuosic, relentlessly driving perpetuum mobile. Morrison captures this architecture
with remarkable balance. The reflective passages speak with vulnerability, while the virtuosic core
surges with controlled intensity, revealing both the athletic and poetic dimensions of the instrument.
Further depth arrives through selections from György Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages, a
collection of concentrated musical aphorisms that distill gesture into its purest form. Each miniature
becomes a moment of speech rather than spectacle. Morrison approaches these works with sensitivity
and restraint, shaping silence as carefully as sound. The program closes with a viola transcription of
Georg Philipp Telemann’s Fantasia No. 1 in E flat, reconnecting the modern ear to baroque clarity,
dance, and rhetorical elegance. In Telemann, articulation becomes architecture, and Morrison’s
phrasing honors both line and character with refined poise.
Throughout Transitions, Jesse Morrison draws a living thread between baroque and contemporary
music, revealing their shared language of gesture, form, and rhythmic vitality. The album becomes a
dialogue across centuries, spoken through an instrument often underestimated yet endlessly expressive.
With this release, Morrison introduces himself not only as a virtuosic performer, but as a thoughtful
curator of sound worlds, inviting listeners into a space where past and present converse with
uncommon intimacy and grace.
Brett Dean on his piece "Skizzen"
Skizzen für Siegbert was commissioned by Hartmut Rohde for the 2012 International Max Rostal Competition through the generous financial support of the Forberg-Schneider Foundation. It was premiered in Berlin on 26th March, 2012 as the compulsory work of the opening round of the Max Rostal Viola Competition.The very first time I ever played in the viola section of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, I was lucky to sit at the same desk as the long-standing and warmly respected Philharmonic violist, Siegbert Ueberschaer. Already in the opening bars of Dvorak’s Stabat Mater I fell foul of the legendary late response time of the orchestra and came in right on the downbeat - as years of orchestral training in Australia had taught me. Siegbert kindly, knowingly, looked at me and said, “Just play with me, breathe with me, as if we were playing chamber music." Siegbert’s guiding hand and subtle yet compelling body language while playing helped me recognize something fundamental about the orchestra’s very particular mechanics and an enduring friendship followed, imbued with his generous spirit and good humour. Siegbert Ueberschaer passed away in 2011. As this work was commissioned as the set-piece for a viola competition, I endeavored to write a work that fulfilled a dual purpose: of both honouring Siegbert’s memory with music for his (and my) beloved instrument while at the same time providing a suitable test piece for an ambitious group of gifted young viola players. Its outer movements, reflective and lamentoso in character, therefore bookend a centrally placed, virtuosic moto perpetuo movement of unrelenting drive.
Derek David on his piece "Partita"
Written in adoration of the solo instrumental works of Johann Sebastian Bach, the Partita explores personal themes of friendship, love & devotion, alienation & longing, mental illness & tragedy within a specific period of my life.
The music encompasses these ideas yet also their effect on the surrounding reality; as in this case, I capture the slow chaotic decay of a loved one’s descent into mental illness and its collision with other elements of my life at that time. Written in a traditional Partita form – Prelude, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue – the composition aims to reflect extreme scenes and emotions through this long-form structure: reflecting one’s psychological deterioration and eventual loss of reality. This narrative, however, is not self-contained, as my personal emotions, reactions, and memories from that time cloud and reconfigure the music.
In addition to the clear influence of Bach’s repertoire, the structure and processes of the composition is deeply rooted in the concepts, techniques, and pedagogy of Partimento, the 18th-century practice of schematic cognitive mapping for counterpoint and harmony. Serving as a structural template for the other movements, the Prelude establishes the contrapuntal and harmonic ideas that are played out in each movement, with varied treatments and variation, to express both the dance form and the emotional narrative of the piece.
