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AguidetoGeorgeBenjamin'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

A guide to George Benjamin's music

Benjamin's latest opera features cannibalism, suicide, sex and murder, and could be a watershed
moment unleashing the expressivity of one of Britain's most essential composers
Tom Service
Monday 25 February 2013 12.41GMT

George Benjamin: one of the doyens of contemporary British composition, whose music
makes sounds of ravishing, shimmering beauty. Every single one of Benjamin's
fastidiously achieved works has a rare and remarkable quality of not a note seeming out
of place, whether it's on the smallest and most exposing scale of music for solo violin or
solo piano, or the grandest canvas of large orchestra or ensemble.
When you hear Benjamin's music, from the contrapuntal exactitude of Shadowlines for
piano to the poetic explosivity of Sudden Time for huge orchestra, you're encountering
one of the most coherent and convincing responses to the challenge of making a music
that's genuinely new but can speak with all the articulacy of earlier musical languages,
and which dazzles and beguiles with its sensuous colours. He's also at the moment
arguably the key contributor to BBC4's series The Sound and the Fury, telling the story of
20th-century music, and his urbane, focused commentary distils his decades of
experience as one of Britain's most important composition teachers, and most eloquent
advocates for new music. He takes care of every word just as much as he does of every
note.
But this most refined and conscientious of musical personalities has just done something
surprising. In his most recent piece, he has put cannibalism, suicide, sex and murder on
stage. The visceral human passion and drama of his largest work to date, the opera
Written on Skin, with a text by Martin Crimp, receives its British premiere at Covent
Garden in March. To coincide with the London premiere, Nimbus is releasing a CD of the
world premiere at Aix-en-Provence last summer; having heard it, what's so striking
about the opera (as reviews of the Aix performances noted) is how Benjamin finds both a
rigorous economy and expressive violence in his music, which does justice to the opera's
stylised storytelling and its unflinching emotional struggles. There are also some
astonishing orchestral colours a glass harmonica, viola da gamba that make Written
on Skin an essential experience, even recorded.
Written on Skin has been a long time coming: there have been premonitions of
Benjamin's unleashed expressivity for the last decade or so. But before we get there, we
need to go back to where Benjamin started. Born in 1960, he had an early musical life
that put him right at the heart of the traditions of European modernism; in fact, he was a
late participant in arguably the single most important compositional crucible of the
entire century: Olivier Messiaen's class at the Paris Conservatoire, in which Pierre
Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Alexander Goehr and hundreds of others had studied in
much earlier generations. In his teens, Benjamin lived in Paris as Messiaen's youngest
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and favourite pupil; he composed a Messiaenic Piano Sonata and began a lifelong love
affair with French musical culture. (Like his mentor, one of Benjamin's musical lodestars
is Debussy's Prlude l'Aprs-Midi d'un Faune.)
His breakthrough for British audiences came at the age of 20, when Ringed by the Flat
Horizon was performed at the Proms in 1980. But what seemed like the preternatural
prodigiousness of Benjamin's achievement in that piece was nothing of the sort: at that
young age, Benjamin knew more than some composers know in a lifetime (he is a
brilliant pianist and important conductor as well as composer), and Ringed by the Flat
Horizon already bore testament to a compositional voice of worldly maturity in its
handling of structure and colour. Above all, the piece creates a symbiosis of technique
and poetry that subsequent works would further refine. In the Turner-inspired At First
Light, the Yeats setting Upon Silence, or A Mind of Winter, which sets Wallace Stevens's
poetry, there's no difference between what the music expresses and how it does so.
Sudden Time crystallises this phase of Benjamin's composition, a 15-minute essay in the
art of orchestral transition, music that flies with gossamer lightness and billows into
gigantic cloudstorms and thunderbursts.
For me, though, it's not until the first of his two Palimpsests for orchestra, written for
Boulez in 2000, that Benjamin made the crucial creative leap towards the emotional and
musical immediacy of his operas (his first is a chamber opera called Into the Little Hill,
also with Crimp, which updates the Pied Piper story). You hear it in the very first
moment of shock in the Palimpsests: after a serene but strange song for clarinets, there's
a brutally loud single chord that cuts across the texture. It's a juxtaposition of two kinds
of music a horizontal unfolding of the clarinets' music and a vertical sonic blast that
propels the structure of the rest of the piece. The Palimpsests compress a gigantic
musical experience into less than 20 minutes, and amount to one of the 21st century's
most compelling orchestral pieces so far. They also introduce a new directness and
energy into Benjamin's music, so that instead of the music's drama coming from a state
of ceaseless and sensuous transition as it does in Sudden Time, the momentum is driven
by the presentation of different but distinct musical objects or characters. That was the
small but seismic step Benjamin took in Palimpsests, and the pieces were the gateway to
his finding the economy, directness and stark but subtle simplicity he needed to tell
stories on stage.
However, none of that prepares you for the vice-like drama of Written on Skin. It might
not just be a watershed for Benjamin's music (and the realisation of his lifelong dream of
writing for the Royal Opera House), but for British opera as a whole. Those performances
at Covent Garden, which Benjamin himself will conduct, could be an operatic revelation.

Five key links

At First Light
A Mind of Winter
Palimpsest I
Dance Figures
Written on Skin [excerpt]
More blogposts

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