Any new work by Sir George Benjamin is always a significant event, and his latest piano composition, Divisions, for four hands, does not disappoint. Premiered in Berlin this summer, and here receiving its first UK performance from the composer and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Divisions packs an enormous amount of concentrated musical thought and pianistic imagination into its 15-minute span.
That’s exactly what we would expect from the famously meticulous Benjamin. His focus in the new piece is the interaction between two players at a single instrument as they counterpose an ever-changing variety of rhythms, dynamics and pianistic effects. The exploration is ingenious and compelling, from the enigmatic opening to an abruptly ambiguous ending which brought smiles all round.
There are moments of Ravel-like delicacy and of great emphasis along the way, as well as some almost cosmic silences. But it works not just because of Benjamin’s musical inventiveness but because the human dialectic between the two players creates a sense of freedom and possibility lurking within the work’s scrupulously crafted pages. The occasional need for air in Benjamin’s music, which Robin Holloway identifies in his spectacular new survey of western classical music, would not be a fair complaint here.
The Benjamin premiere came as the climax to what was already a characteristically ambitious recital by Aimard. He had opened with the imposing and sacramental Révélation, written in 1915 by Nicolas Obouhow, a piece and a composer whom Aimard has often championed for his mystic modernism. Pierre Boulez’s groundbreaking first piano sonata of 1946 followed, with the toccata-like second movement electrifyingly played.
The contrast between the Boulez and Benjamin’s Shadowlines, the intricate and delicate set of canon-based pieces written for Aimard in 2001, which brought the first half of the recital to a close, could hardly have been greater. Aimard’s performance after the break of Ravel’s graceful 1917 wartime invocation of 18th-century France, Le Tombeau de Couperin, provided further evidence that he remains equal to most challenges and continues to be one of the essential keyboard advocates of our era.
