Every one of George Benjamin's pieces is a model of concision and directness, but there is something special about the vividness of A Mind of Winter, his setting of a Wallace Stevens poem for soprano and chamber orchestra. Performed by Valdine Anderson and conducted by Colin Davis, it was the only Benjamin work in the latest instalment of the London Symphony Orchestra's By George! series, curated by Benjamin himself.
He captured the atmosphere of Stevens's winter with a sequence of chilling gestures: flurries of high woodwind and string writing that sounded like a biting winter wind, and the frosty brilliance of string harmonics and glissandos. The piece not only evoked the sounds of winter, it conjured the psychological world of the poem. The vocal line seemed to float free of the surrounding texture, as if the singer were intruding upon a natural landscape.
Anderson created a sense of solitude and isolation in her performance, particularly in the final lines. She became the haunted listener of Stevens's poem, hearing the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is", set to Benjamin's mysterious and static music. The piece may have lasted only nine minutes, but Davis and the LSO revealed the subtlety of this musical snowstorm.
There was poetry of another kind in Radu Lupu's performance of Mozart's A major Piano Concerto, K414. He and Davis found a relaxed intimacy in this work, especially in the sensuous dance of the slow movement. Lupu's laid-back style - he plays with his back pressed into a chair as if distancing himself from his instrument - concealed the hard-won artistry of his performance.
Davis's interpretation of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony was similarly balanced between immediacy and profundity. On the surface, this was the kind of big-band Beethoven we used to hear before the early music revolution, with an enormous string section and broad tempos. But the refinement and insight of Davis's conducting illuminated the complexity of Beethoven's most elusive symphony.
He shaped the first movement with a lifetime's skill and experience, building the structure towards the overwhelming return of the first theme. The finale was even more thrilling, as the LSO generated an irresistible momentum from the music's bizarre changes of mood, register and texture.
