George Benjamin (composer).html
 
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George Benjamin (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 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 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 will receive its London premiere at the Royal Opera House in February 2009.

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.

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 and the Berlin Philharmonic. 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.

His most recent work, '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.

Benjamin has been a teacher and mentor to such younger composers as Luke Bedford and Dai Fujikura. 3

Benjamin's oeuvre been described as exhibiting "consummate craftsmanship" coloured by "a love of rich and unusually coloured sonorities". 4

George Benjamin 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.

Contents

Selected Works

Orchestral

  • Altitude, 1977
  • Ringed by the Flat Horizon, 1979-80
  • At First Light, 1982
  • Fanfare for Aquarius, 1983
  • Antara, 1985-87
  • Sudden Time, 1989-935
  • Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra, 1993-95
  • Palimpsest I, 1998-99
  • Palimpsest II, 2002
  • Dance Figures, 20046
  • Duet for piano and orchestra, 2008

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)

Vocal & Choral

Piano

  • Sonata for Piano, 1977-78
  • Sortilèges, 1981
  • Three Studies, 1982-85
  • Shadowlines, 2001
  • Piano Figures, 2006

References

  1. ^ Angelique Chrisafis, "British composer's 20-year opera quest ends with Paris premiere". The Guardian, 25 November 2006.
  2. ^ He was artisic consultant to the BBC's 3-year retrospective of 20th-century music for the Milennium, 'Sounding the Century'. There have been major retrospectives of his worke in London, Pris, Tokyo, Brussells, Berlin, Strasbourg, San Francisco and Madrid.George Benjamin, "My heroes and I". The Guardian, 20 September 2002.
  3. ^ Tom Service (4 February 2005). "I'm inspired by Stockhausen, Xenakis … and Seinfeld". The Guardian. Retrieved on 2008-10-27.
  4. ^ Gavin Thomas. "George Benjamin article and review of works". CompositionToday. Retrieved on 2008-02-27.
  5. ^ Bernard Holland, "Tick, Tock or Maybe Tock, Tick" (review of Carnegie Hall premiere). The New York Times, 2 April 2007
  6. ^ Tom Service, "BBCSO/Robertson" (review of 2006 Prom 14). The Guardian, 26 July 2006.
  7. ^ Andrew Clements, "Into the Little Hill" (review of Opéra Bastille, Paris production). The Guardian, 25 November 2006.

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