George Benjamin (composer)
George William John Benjamin, CBE (born 31 January 1960, London, England) is a British composer of classical music. He is also a conductor, pianist and teacher.
Benjamin attended Westminster School and then studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire during the second half of the 1970s. Messiaen was reported to have described Benjamin as his favourite pupil.[1]
He then read music at King's College, Cambridge, studying under Alexander Goehr, and emerged in his early twenties as a mature and confident voice. His orchestral piece Ringed by the Flat Horizon (written for the Cambridge University Musical Society and premiered in Cambridge under the baton of Mark Elder on 5 March 1980) was performed at The Proms that August, while he was still a student, making him the youngest living composer ever to have had music performed at the Proms.
Since the 1980s he has fulfilled a number of large commissions, including Sudden Time (for orchestra), Three Inventions (for chamber orchestra) and Antara (for ensemble and electronics, realised at IRCAM and the first composition ever published using the Sibelius notation program).
In 1993, Benjamin curated the first Meltdown music festival in London. In 1992-1994, he helped Yvonne Loriod complete her husband Olivier Messiaen's last work, Concert à quatre.
Benjamin taught composition at the Royal College of Music, London, for sixteen years, where he became the first Prince Consort Professor of Composition before he succeeded Sir Harrison Birtwistle as Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King's College London in January 2001.
In the 2002-2003 concert season, the London Symphony Orchestra gave a season-long festival of concerts which he curated, called "By George!".[2]
His first operatic work 'Into The Little Hill', a collaboration with playwright Martin Crimp, was premiered at the Festival d'Automne in Paris in 2006 and has toured widely on both sides of the Atlantic. It received its London premiere at the Royal Opera House in February 2009.
His Duet for piano and orchestra, was commissioned by Roche for the 2008 Lucerne Festival, where he was Composer-in-Residence, and was premiered there by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Moest.
He will serve as Music Director of the 2010 Ojai Music Festival in California.[3]
His current project is an opera, Written on Skin,[4] to a libretto by Martin Crimp (with whom he collaborated on Into the Little Hill), commissioned by the Aix-en-Provence Festival,[5] where it will première in July 2012, with subsequent performances at Covent Garden, La Scala, Netherlands Opera, Bavarian State Opera, Wiener Festwochen and in Toulouse at the Théâtre du Capitole.[6]
Benjamin's oeuvre been described as exhibiting "consummate craftsmanship" coloured by "a love of rich and unusually coloured sonorities".[7]
Benjamin has been a teacher and mentor to such younger composers as Luke Bedford and Dai Fujikura.[8]
As a conductor he regularly appears with some of the world's leading ensembles and orchestras, amongst them the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, the Cleveland and Concertgebouw orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie. In 1999 he made his operatic debut conducting Pelléas et Mélisande at la Monnaie, Brussels and he has conducted numerous world premieres, important works by Wolfgang Rihm, Unsuk Chin, Grisey and Ligeti.
Benjamin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours.[9] He is a Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et Lettres and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and was awarded the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester's first ever Schoenberg prize for composition in 2002.
[edit] Awards
[edit] Selected works
[edit] Orchestral
- Altitude, 1977
- Ringed by the Flat Horizon, 1979–80
- At First Light, 1982
- Fanfare for Aquarius, 1983
- Antara, 1985–87
- Sudden Time, 1989-93[10]
- Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra, 1993–95
- Palimpsest I, 1998–99
- Palimpsest II, 2002
- Dance Figures, 2004[11]
- Duet for piano and orchestra, 2008
[edit] Chamber music
- Sonata for Violin and Piano, 1976–77
- Octet, ( for flute (+ piccolo), clarinet, violin, viola, cello, double bass, celesta, percussion), 1978
- Flight, flute, 1979
- Viola, Viola, duo for 2 violas (1996)
[edit] Vocal & Choral
- Jubilation (vocalise), 1996
- A Mind of Winter (text by Wallace Stevens), 1981
- Upon Silence (text by William Butler Yeats), 1991
- Into the Little Hill, 2006 (opera)[12]
[edit] Piano
- Sonata for Piano, 1977–78
- Sortilèges, 1981
- Three Studies, 1982–85
- Shadowlines, 2001
- Piano Figures, 2006
- Two or Four, 2010
[edit] Other
Benjamin, in conjunction with Yvonne Loriod and Heinz Holliger, orchestrated part of one of Olivier Messiaen's final works Concert à quatre, in 1994.
[edit] References
- ^ Angelique Chrisafis, "British composer's 20-year opera quest ends with Paris premiere". The Guardian, 25 November 2006.
- ^ He was artistic consultant to the BBC's 3-year retrospective of 20th-century music for the Millennium, 'Sounding the Century'. There have been major retrospectives of his work in London, Pris, Tokyo, Brussels, Berlin, Strasbourg, San Francisco and Madrid.George Benjamin, "My heroes and I". The Guardian, 20 September 2002.
- ^ Swed, Mark (June 15, 2009). "Review: eighth blackbird and other new music at Ojai Music Festival". Los Angeles Times. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/06/eighth-blackbird-at-ojai-festival.html. Retrieved June 15, 2009.
- ^ http://www.barbarahannigan.com/about.htm
- ^ http://www.fabermusic.com/Composers-Biography.aspx?ComposerId=47
- ^ http://aotos.org.uk/conferences/2011/summer/speakers/
- ^ Gavin Thomas. "George Benjamin article and review of works". CompositionToday. http://www.compositiontoday.com/articles/benjamin.asp. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
- ^ Tom Service (4 February 2005). "I'm inspired by Stockhausen, Xenakis … and Seinfeld". The Guardian. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/fridayreview/story/0,,1404819,00.html. Retrieved 2008-10-27.
- ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 59446. p. 7. 12 June 2010.
- ^ Bernard Holland, "Tick, Tock or Maybe Tock, Tick" (review of Carnegie Hall premiere). The New York Times, 2 April 2007
- ^ Tom Service, "BBCSO/Robertson" (review of 2006 Prom 14). The Guardian, 26 July 2006.
- ^ Andrew Clements, "Into the Little Hill" (review of Opéra Bastille, Paris production). The Guardian, 25 November 2006.
[edit] External links
- George Benjamin's page at King's College London
- Page on the website of Faber Music, Benjamin's publisher, with biography, catalogue of works and details of forthcoming performances
- George Benjamin, "In the realm of the senses" (article on György Ligeti). The Guardian, 23 February 2007.
- Education project on collection "Piano Figures" – George Benjamin explains his work in short films
- (French) A biography of George Benjamin (composer), from IRCAM's website.
- 1960 births
- Living people
- 20th-century classical composers
- 21st-century classical composers
- Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
- English composers
- English classical pianists
- Academics of King's College London
- Old Westminsters
- Academics of the Royal College of Music
- Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music
- English conductors (music)
- Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
