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  09 Mar 20 Philharmonia Orchestra
  Royal Festival Hall

  “Exquisitely crafted [the programme]… Janacek’s 1926 Sinfonietta closed the programme with a blaze of extra brass, the pace swift, the flavours intense, the playing tight and bright.”

  Anna Picard, The Times, March 2020

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  16 Feb 20 Written on Skin Festival Présences
  Philharmonie de Paris

  “But what an orchestra! The Radio France Philharmonic seems galvanized by the presence of the composer at the baton… the conductor keeps a rhythmic and precise gesture at all times, and thus allows impeccable synchronisation between instruments, whose alloys give rise to sublime, always unexpected sounds (like this viola da gamba-harp combination in one of the Boy’s tunes).”

  Clara Leonardi, Bachtrack, February 2020

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  03 Sep 19 Lucerne Festival Academy
  KKL Lucerne

  “Dank Benjamins Dirigat durfte man endlich wieder hören und sehen, wozu das Academy-Orchester fähig ist: zu glasklarer Präzision und zu begeisternder Hingabe zur zeitgenössischen Musik. Das Orchester hat mit Benjamin geklungen, wie es bislang nur mit Pierre Boulez und Susanna Mälkki klang.”

  Katharina Thalmann, Luzerner Zeitung, September 2019

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  02 May 19 BENJAMIN Lessons in Love and Violence DVD
  

  “His orchestral imagination is prodigious, and both as composer and conductor he conjures up memorable soundscapes full of jittery tension.”

  Performance ****
  Picture & Sound ****

  John Allison, BBC Music Magazine, May 2019

  “With Benjamin himself as conductor the orchestral playing is precision-tuned.”

  Richard Fairman, Gramophone Magazine, May 2019

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  04 Aug 18 National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain BBC Proms
  Royal Albert Hall

  “The composer-conductor George Benjamin was at the helm, his gentle precision moulding everything we heard. He focused on the fundamentals: the way Ravel sculpts surges of sound in his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, for instance, or how Rimsky-Korsakov fills out the orchestral colours of Mussorgsky’s elemental A Night on the Bare Mountain. Each performance grew from Benjamin’s unerring sense of rhythm and metre — that flow of time that underpins all music.”

  The Times, Rebecca Franks, 7 August 2018

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  21 Jul 18 London Sinfonietta BBC Proms
  The Roundhouse

  “The ceremonies of Symphonies of Wind Instruments were all biting clarity and palpable, if understated, grief. Benjamin studied composition with Messiaen and remains one of the great interpreters of his music; Et Exspecto, awesomely played, was genuinely overwhelming in its progression from darkness to its final contemplation of God’s inscrutable majesty.”

  The Guardian, Tim Ashley, 23 July 2018

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  17 May 18 BENJAMIN Lessons in Love and Violence
  Royal Opera House, London

  “Compellingly conducted by Mr. Benjamin… Without pandering, they’ve [Benjamin & Crimp] made another significant contribution to the art form.”

  “But it’s Mr. Benjamin’s remarkable music that gives the work its charge: The writing is so lush, haunting and detailed — radiant one moment, piercingly dissonant the next — that you are continuously enveloped by the raucous beauty of the sounds.”

  The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, 11 May 2018

   

  “Benjamin conducts with a composer’s authority, nobly honoured by the orchestra.”

  The Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen, 11 May 2018

   

  “Benjamin, as conductor, was absolutely in control, the ROH orchestra ready to paint in every possible colour and texture.”

  Opera Magazine, Erica Jeal, 12 May 2018

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  01 Jul 17 BENJAMIN Into the Little Hill CD
  

  London Sinfonietta, Hila Plitmann (soprano), Susan Bickley (contralto), Nimbus Records

  “… the new version [Into the Little Hill] boasts long-standing Benjamin advocate Susan Bickley alongside the highly versatile soprano Hila Plitmann with the composer at the helm … this latest addition to Nimbus to the Benjamin discography is altogether essential listening.”
  ★★★★★, BBC Music Magazine, July 2017

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  30 Jan 17 BENJAMIN Written on Skin
  Royal Opera House, London

  “Benjamin himself conducts, and in his quietly assured hands, the music glistens.”
  ★★★★★ Hannah Nepil, Financial Times, 16 January 2017

  ” … everything that happens in the orchestra pit is intimately related to the drama that unfolds. The sheer technical skill informing this is breathtaking. The composer himself conducts here with unassertive authority, drawing playing of crystal clarity from an orchestra swelled with the unconventional sounds of glass harmonica, sleigh-bells, viol and steel drum. There is magic in the air.”
  ★★★★★ Rupert Christiansen, Telegraph, 14 January 2017

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  08 Sep 16 Ligeti, Murail and Benjamin: Musica Viva Vol 22 CD
  

  “Benjamin’s performance of Ligeti’s Lontano, a 20th-century classic, is exceptional for its transparency and its wonderfully controlled sense of mystery, as if the real key to the music is always just out of reach. Benjamin has recorded his own Palimpsests before, with Ensemble Modern for Nimbus Records, but this performance of the pair of linked pieces, first performed in 2000 and 2002 and dedicated to Pierre Boulez, seems even more poised and impressive than that one. Like all the best music, Palimpsests makes up its own structural rules as it goes along, defining its aims and achieving them with total success.”
  ★★★★  Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 8 September 2016

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  15 Aug 15 BENJAMIN Into the Little Hill
  Alice Tully Hall

  During a discussion onstage after the opening-night performance of George Benjamin’s haunting opera ‘Written on Skin’, Mr. Benjamin, who has conducted the piece many times, lavished praise on the textured, exciting performance Alan Gilbert had just led.

  “I’m a composer who conducts,” Mr. Benjamin told the audience. Pointing to Mr. Gilbert, he added, “This is a real conductor.”

  On Sunday afternoon, however, Mr. Benjamin demonstrated to a nearly full house at Alice Tully Hall that he is a highly skilled conductor. In a program presented by the increasingly innovative Mostly Mozart festival, Mr. Benjamin led the International Contemporary Ensemble, a crack new-music group, in riveting, lucid accounts of Messiaen’s ‘Oiseaux Exotiques’ and Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, both featuring the brilliant French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. After intermission, Mr. Benjamin conducted ‘Into the Little Hill’, his 2006 chamber opera, a grimly modern take on ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, with an eerily alluring 40-minute score. That Mr. Benjamin led such an assured account of his mysterious opera was no surprise. His depth as a conductor came through especially in the dazzling performances of the Messiaen and Ligeti works he drew from the superb players.

  ‘Oiseaux Exotiques’ (‘Exotic Birds’), composed in the mid-1950s, sounded stunningly fresh in this animated performance. Scored for varied wind instruments, percussion and a piano (a formidable solo part), this sixteen minute piece sounds like a carefully rendered mélange of birdsongs, from chirpy short ones to skittish riffs that almost suggest twelve tone rows. On the surface the music may seem thorny, but it’s hard to think of a more riotously joyful mid-twentieth-century score.

  Ligeti’s 5-movement piano concerto might be a repertory work were it not so difficult. In this twentyfive-minute score, completed in 1988, you hear elements of the styles that fired Ligeti’s imagination, from Bartok’s folkloric idiom to Conlon Nancarrow’s giddily complex player-piano works. Yet here is an idiosyncratic concerto teeming with invention.

  As with ‘Written on Skin’, ambiguities permeate ‘Into the Little Hill’, the first operatic collaboration between Mr. Benjamin and the playwright Martin Crimp. The setting is vague. There is even a suggestion that the rats plaguing the town could be other, undesirable people. Just two singers, a soprano and a mezzo-soprano, share all the roles and mix lines of narration into their dialogue. The pied piper is a creepy figure: a man with no eyes, nose or ears.This unconventional opera might seem hard to stage, though a simple, effective production was presented by Lincoln Center Festival in 2007. Mr. Benjamin’s rumbling, spectral and mysterious music, scored for an unusual ensemble including basset horns and a banjo, worked its magic in Sunday’s taut, intense concert performance. The mellow-voiced mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley varied her sound and persona impressively as the Minister and the Minister’s Wife; the agile soprano Hila Plitmann brought radiant sound, even during passages of sky-high vocal writing, to the Stranger and the Minister’s Child. Both also sang the music of the Narrator and the Crowd.

  That Mr. Benjamin’s work shared a program with two giants of 20th-century music seemed entirely fitting.

  Read the full review in The New York Times here.

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  03 Apr 14 BENJAMIN Written on Skin DVD release
  

  “George Benjamin’s opera is the most subtle, the most sophisticated, the most powerful musical drama of the modern era … Benjamin’s achievement is to make opera seem natural in the 21st century: Written on Skin is a vivid successor to Pelléas et Mélisande in its lyrical sensuousness and to Wozzeck in its cinematographic fluency and unsparing analysis of the human condition.”
  Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 31 January 2014

  “The first truly great opera of the 21st century … [its] communicative power is immense, with Benjamin’s highly coloured music, never forbiddingly complex, consistently moving in step with Martin Crimp’s tangy and chiselled words.”
  Geoff Brown, The Times, 17 January 2014