It was not a full-strength London Symphony for the latest instalment of the Barbican concert series curated by George Benjamin, but a chamber-sized version, drawn largely from the orchestra's principals. If the other concerts in the By George! season place Benjamin's music in the context of the 19th- and early 20th-century composers who have meant most to him, this programme consisted entirely of pieces composed in the past 50 years, including the premiere of a new work by the man himself, his first for solo piano in more than two decades.
Shadowlines was composed in 2001 for the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a friend of Benjamin since they were students together at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1970s. It is a sequence of six short movements designed to build into a single cumulative structure. Each of the components is a different kind of canon, though not always a canon as we would recognise it. In some the intervals contract or expand between entries, in others the rhythmic values are compressed or extended. The result is absorbing, by turns wirily thematic (recalling the world of the Four Studies in Rhythm by Benjamin and Aimard's teacher Messiaen) and luminously impressionistic (harking back to an earlier generation of French composers), and always precisely imagined for Aimard's exceptional gifts.
Benjamin began the concert by conducting Oliver Knussen's jewel-like Two Organa, making them sound very different from the composer's own performances, less punchy, more fragile, and Boulez's first two Improvisations on Mallarmé from Pli Selon Pli, with Valdine Anderson as the seraphic soloist. Wedged between such perfectly achieved scores Jonathan Cole's new Penumbra, commissioned by the LSO for the series, left little impression. The composer's note described it as "an imaginary exploration of an unknown place filled with the dark reflections of an unknown past", and with a preponderance of low-pitched wind in the ensemble, the colours were certainly dark, but the musical ideas lacked any presence, and their continuity seemed uncertainly plotted.
The best came last, however, in the shape of a quite wonderful account of Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques. The musical structure may be schematic, but Aimard delivers the solo piano part in this work with more panache and flair than anyone has ever done. Benjamin conducted it with missionary zeal, and the LSO players responded to both of them with playing of febrile brilliance; from prairie chicken to laughing thrush, these birds sang as if their lives depended upon it.
