Introduction
Born in 1960, George Benjamin 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 Elder. 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 collaboration, Written on Skin was premiered at the Aix-en-Provence festival in July 2012 and has since been performed by 20 international opera houses. A new collaboration with Martin Crimp, Lessons in Love and Violence, was premiered at the Royal Opera House in May 2018, under the composer’s baton.
As a conductor Benjamin has a broad repertoire and has conducted numerous world premieres, including important works by Rihm, Chin, Grisey and Ligeti. He regularly works with some of the world’s leading orchestras, amongst them the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern.
Since 2001 Benjamin has been the Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King‘s College, London and was made a Fellow of the College in 2017. Benjamin was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015 and was knighted in the 2017 Birthday Honours.
His works are published by Faber Music and are recorded on Nimbus Records.
Video & Audio
Performance Schedule
- More info 18:00 12 Jan 2020 Alte Oper Frankfurt, FRANKFURT AM MAIN
GYORGY LIGETI Clocks and Clouds
IGOR STRAVINSKY Symphonies of Wind Instruments
GEORGE BENJAMIN Dream of the Song
Interval
PAUL DUKAS The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
MAURICE RAVEL Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2Countertenor: Tim Mead
Orchestra: Junge Deutsche Philharmonie
Choir: SWR Vokalensemble - More info 20:00 07 Feb 2020 Auditorium de Radio France, PARIS
GERARD PESSON Ravel à son âme
GEORGE BENJAMIN Duet for piano and orchestra
HANS ABRAHAMSEN Left, alone
Interval
CLAIRE-MÉLANIE SINNHUBER New work
GEORGE BENJAMIN PalimpsestsConductor: Sir George Benjamin
Piano: Vanessa Benelli Mosell
Piano: Alexandre Tharaud
:: Orchestre National de France - More info 20:30 14 Feb 2020 Philharmonie de Paris, PARIS
GEORGE BENJAMIN Written on Skin
Agnes: Barbara Hannigan
Protector: Ross Ramgobin
The Boy: Tim Mead
Angel 2: Victoria Simmonds
Angel 3: Nicholas Sharratt
Glass harmonica: Philipp Marguerre
Bass viol: Romina Lischka
Orchestra: Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France - More info 19:30 16 Feb 2020 Wiener Konzerthaus, VIENNA
GEORGE BENJAMIN Written on Skin
Agnes: Barbara Hannigan
Protector: Ross Ramgobin
The Boy: Tim Mead
Angel 2: Victoria Simmonds
Angel 3: Nicholas Sharratt
Glass harmonica: Philipp Marguerre
Bass viol: Romina Lischka
Orchestra: Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France - More info 19:30 05 Mar 2020 Royal Festival Hall, LONDON
OLIVER KNUSSEN Choral
GEORGE BENJAMIN Duet for piano and orchestra
Interval
GEORGE BENJAMIN Dream of the Song
LEOS JANACEK SinfoniettaCountertenor: James Hall
Piano: Pierre Laurent Aimard
Choir: Philharmonia Voices
Orchestra: Philharmonia Orchestra
From The Green Room
Online Performances
Press
- More info 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
- More info 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.”
- More info 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.”
- More info 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.”
- More info 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
- More info 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 - More info 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 - More info 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 - More info 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.
- More info 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
Discography
- More info George Benjamin
- More info Musica Viva 22
- More info Horizon 7
- More info Written On Skin (DVD)
Label: Opus Arte
Release Date: 06 Jan 14
Composer: GEORGE BENJAMIN
Text: Martin CrimpThe Protector: Christopher Purves
Agnès: Barbara Hannigan
Angel 1/The Boy: Bejun Mehta
Angel 2/Marie: Victoria Simmonds
Angel 3/John: Allan Clayton
Angel Archivists: David Alexander, Laura Harling, Peter Hobday, Sarah NorthgravesOrchestra of the Royal Opera House
Co-Concert Master: Sergey Levitin
Conductor: GEORGE BENJAMIN
Director: Katie Mitchell
Designs: Vicki Mortimer
Lighting design: Jon ClarkRecorded: 2013
- More info Written On Skin (CD)
Label: Nimbus Records
Release Date: 04 Feb 13
Recording of the first performance at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, 2012
Composer: GEORGE BENJAMIN
Text: Martin CrimpAgnès: Barbara Hannigan
Angel 1/The Boy: Bejun Mehta
The Protector: Christopher Purves
Angel 2/Marie: Rebecca Jo Loeb
Angel 3/John: Allan ClaytonMahler Chamber Orchestra
Conductor: GEORGE BENJAMINPlus Duet for Piano & Orchestra
Piano: Pierre-Laurent Aimard - More info George Benjamin Piano Figures: Ten short pieces for solo piano
- More info Horizon 2, A Tribute to Olivier Messiaen
Label: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Release Date: 11 Jan 10
DUKAS /VAN KEULEN La plainte, au loin, du faune…
Recorded live at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam on 8 an 9 November 2007MESSIAEN Les offrandes oubliées
Recorded live at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam on 8 an 9 November 2007DALBAVIE La source d’un regard
Leo van Doeselaar, organ
Recorded live at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam on 8 an 9 November 2007MESSIAEN Chronochromie
Recorded live at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam on 8 an 9 November 2007ZUIDAM Adam-Interludes*
Recorded live at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam on 13 and 14 June 2008Conductor: GEORGE BENJAMIN
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra(*Ingo Metzmacher, conductor)
- More info George Benjamin Palimpsests and other Orchestral Works
- More info Benjamin 'Viola Viola' and other chamber music
Label: Nimbus Records
Release Date: 23 Aug 03
Shadowlines:
Cantabile
Wild
Scherzando
Tempestoso
Very Freely, Solemn And Spacious
Gently Flowing, FlexiblePiano: Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Viola, Viola
Viola: Tabea Zimmerman, Antoine Tamestit
Three studies for solo piano:
Fantasy On Uambic Rhythm
Meditation On Haydn’s Name
Relativity RagPiano: GEORGE BENJAMIN
Piano Sonata:
Vivace
Lento
Allegro StraziandoPiano: GEORGE BENJAMIN
- More info George Benjamin 'A Mind of Winter' and other Orchestral Works
Label: Nimbus Records
Release Date: 03 Apr 00
BENJAMIN
Ringed by the Flat Horizon
Cello: Ross Pople
Conductor: Mark Elder
BBC Symphony OrchestraA Mind of Winter
Soprano: Penelope Walmsley-Clarke
Conductor: GEORGE BENJAMIN
London SinfoniettaAt First Light
Conductor: GEORGE BENJAMIN
London SinfoniettaPanorama
Antara
Conductor: GEORGE BENJAMIN
London Sinfonietta - More info George Benjamin Orchestral and Chamber Music
- More info Harvey, Boulez and Benjamin Orchestra Music
Articles
Zachary Woolfe from The New York Times interviews George Benjamin ahead of the US premiere of Dream of the Song, 22nd July 2016.
George Benjamin writes on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, The Guardian, 29th May 2013.
Alan Rusbridger from The Guardian interviews George Benjamin ahead of the Southbank Centre’s weekend festival celebrating his work (as part of the Cultural Olympiad), 10th May 2013.
Opera News interviews George Benjamin, just ahead of the world premiere of Written on Skin, July 2012.