You have to feel slightly sorry for viola players. Not only is the solo repertoire for the instrument very thin, they have to put up with being the butt of innumerable jokes by other orchestral musicians (An example: What's the sweetest sound a viola can make? Splash!)

As a composer who played viola with the Berlin Philharmonic for 16 years, Brett Dean seems keenly aware of his outsider status. "So much music written for the viola is characterised by a particular sense of melancholy," he says, "invariably coupled with a busy, dogged brand of defiance or even gruffness."

His own concerto - which Dean performed with the BBC Philharmonic as the centrepiece of a mini-festival dedicated to his work - is an attempt to wipe the slate clean of viola cliches and investigate the "true character of the instrument".

Perhaps it is an example of extreme self-deprecation on Dean's part, or cloth ears on mine, but the character he evokes does indeed seem to be primarily dogged, gruff and defiant.

But Dean's brilliant sense of humour comes to the fore in a suite of extracts from a forthcoming opera based on Peter Carey's novel Bliss, due to be premiered in Sydney in 2010. For this story of an Australian advertising executive who thinks he has died and gone to hell, Dean combines street noise, advertising jingles and air-conditioning hum in a hellish potpourri of modern life that climaxes in a convulsive orchestral heart attack. If Dean's vocal writing is half as expressive, he could be on course to produce the first great landmark opera of the 21st century.