One of today’s most prominent composer-conductors, George Benjamin was born in 1960 and began composing at the age of seven. In 1976 he entered the Paris Conservatoire to study with Messiaen, after which he worked with Alexander Goehr at King's College, Cambridge.
When Benjamin was only 20 years old, Ringed by the Flat Horizon was played at the BBC Proms by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Mark Elder. The London Sinfonietta, under Sir Simon Rattle, premiered At First Light two years later. The London Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez premiered Palimpsests in 2002 to mark the opening of ‘By George’, a season-long portrait which also included the premiere of Shadowlines by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Recent seasons have seen major surveys of Benjamin’s work at the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Composer Festival at Konzerthaus Stockholm and Radio France’s Festival Présences, during which he conducted a performance of Written on Skin in the Paris Philharmonie. In March 2020 the Philharmonia Orchestra presented a concert at the South Bank to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, and in September he conducted performances with two groups with whom he has had a particularly close association over many years, Ensemble Modern and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The latter gave the world premiere of Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra at the 2021 BBC Proms under his baton, with subsequent performances at the Berlin Musikfest and at the Elbphilharmonie.
Benjamin’s first operatic work Into the Little Hill, written with playwright Martin Crimp, was commissioned in 2006 by the Festival d'Automne in Paris. Their second opera, Written on Skin, premiered at the Aix-en- Provence festival in July 2012, has since been presented at over 20 international opera houses, winning many international prizes. A further collaboration with Martin Crimp, Lessons in Love and Violence, was premiered at the Royal Opera House in May 2018 and over 50 performances have already been scheduled around the world. Both of these large-scale works were filmed for release on DVD and broadcast by BBC television.
As a conductor Benjamin has a broad repertoire - ranging from Mozart and Schumann to Knussen and Abrahamsen - and has been responsible for numerous world premieres, including important works by Rihm, Chin, Grisey and Ligeti. Recent seasons have seen him conduct the Berliner Philharmoniker, Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble and Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the London Sinfonietta (both at the BBC Proms).
Since 2001 Benjamin has been the Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King‘s College London. His works are published by Faber Music and are recorded on Nimbus Records. He has received numerous honorary fellowships and international awards, was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015 and was knighted in the 2017 Birthday Honours. In 2019 he was given the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale.
Sir George Benjamin's pieces Shadowlines and At First Light premiered in Chicago for the first time at the Logan Center on October 1, 2022.
Program notes:
Shadowlines:
This sequence of pieces, all canons in different ways, was conceived as a continuous, cumulative structure: 1) A brief, seemingly improvisatory prologue.
2) The high register, fierce and harshly chromatic, against the lower, which is consonant and calm; a compact coda reconciles these opposites.
3) A miniature scherzo, all within the space of 11/2 octaves in the bass, leading immediately to:
4) Explosive and monolithic, the pianist’s hands perpetually rifting apart then reuniting in rhythmical unison.
5) The most expansive and lyrical movement; at its heart a slow groundbass, over which builds a widely contrasted procession of textures. After a short pause:
6) A simple and gentle epilogue.
This work was written for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and was commissioned by Betty Freeman.
At First Light:
In the Tate Gallery there is a late Turner oil painting, Norham Castle, Sunrise. The 12th century castle in this picture is silhouetted against a huge, golden sun. What struck me immediately about this beautiful image was the way in which solid objects—fields, cows and the castle itself—virtually appear to have melted under the intense sunlight. It is as if the paint were still wet. Abstractly, this observation has been important to the way I have composed the piece. A ‘solid object’ can be formed as a punctuated, clearly defined musical phrase. This can be ‘melted’ into a flowing, nebulous continuum of sound. There can be all manner of transformations and interactions between these two ways of writing. Equally important, however, this piece is a contemplation of dawn, a celebration of the colours and noises of daybreak. It is set in three movements: in the short, opening one, superimposed fanfares burst into hazy, undefined textures. After a pause the extended second movement follows, itself subdivided into several contrasted sections, full of abrupt changes in mood and tension. The concluding movement arrives without a break, and progresses in a continuous, flowing line illuminated with ever more resonant harmonies. At First Light, which is dedicated to Donald and Kathleen Mitchell, was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. The première, under Simon Rattle, took place in November 1982.