Dean Burry
Composer
Composer and librettist Dean Burry is a storyteller. In addition to his extensive work in the opera and concert music fields, he has become one of the world’s leading composers of children’s opera, his works receiving performances across Canada, the United States, Europe, China and Brazil. At over 600 performances, his opera The Brothers Grimm is one of the most produced operas of the twenty-first century and performances of his stage and concert music continue to inspire and excite audience of all ages.
OPERA
SHANAWDITHIT
Commissioned by Tapestry Opera and Opera on the Avalon in 2019 with Algonquin librettist Yvette Nolan, this ground-breaking opera tells on the story of Shanawdithit (1801-1829), thought at the time of her death to be the last member of the Beothuk Nation in Newfoundland, Canada. Shanawdithit was awarded the 2020 DORA Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Opera.
OPERA for Young People
THE HOBBIT
Burry’s operatic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved novel The Hobbit premiered in Toronto in 2004 and has received acclaimed and repeated productions at the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, Sarasota Opera, Tulsa Opera, Detroit Opera and Kentucky Opera. In 2017, the opera received its European premiere to sold out houses in Ljubljana, Slovenia and will see several new production in 2024-2025, it’s 20th anniversary.
Premiere: May 2001, Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus
orchestral work
Tracing Colville
In the summer of 2019, Burry embarked on a whirlwind and life-changing research trip through Europe following the trail, exactly seventy-five years later, of famed Canadian painter Alex Colville. Colville had been a war artist in the Second World War and his works paint a vivid and poignant picture of camaraderie, hope, determination, destruction and despair. Following the trip, he composed Tracing Colville for symphony orchestra. The work charts the parallel journeys of a war artist and composer through four key locations of the Canadian experience in WW2 through its four ten-minute movements: I.Yorkshire, June of 1944, II. Côte d’Azur – August 15, 1944,III. Nijmegen – November, 1944 and IV. Bergen-Belsen, April, 1945. Tracing Colville received its world-premiere with the Kingston Symphony Orchestra on October 30, 2022.
Premiere: Fall 2022, Kingston Symphony Orchestra
Song Cycle
THE Highwayman
“The wind was a torrent of darkness”. Burry’s chilling chamber music setting of Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman tells the story of a dashing robber who rides through the stormy night for a tryst with his true love, Bess, at an English country inn. The robber is betrayed to the British army and Bess is forced to make a terrible choice between her lover’s safety and her own brutal death. Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal 1912 work Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, The Highwayman was released on the Centredisc/Naxos of Canada label in the October, 2023.
Music Theatre
Sweetheart: THe Mary Pickford Story
Sweetheart is a one-woman musical that explores the professional life of a remarkable Canadian artist and businesswoman, Mary Pickford. Born in 1892 as Gladys Smith into poverty in Toronto, Ontario, she first became a stage actress, eventually becoming an important Broadway performer and eventually a star in the nascent film industry winning an Oscar in 1929.
