George Benjamin is famous as one of the most important composers of his generation, and as a conductor, he is an incisive interpreter of 20th-century music. His concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra - part of the Barbican's By George! series, curated by Benjamin - revealed connections between his own music and works by his compositional idols.
His conducting is defined by the same features that distinguish his music: a fastidious ear for detail and clarity, combined with an unerring sense of structure and pacing. His performance of the suite from Ravel's Mother Goose was both luxurious and luminous, and the fairy-tale characters of Sleeping Beauty and Hop o' my Thumb sprang magically to life.
The players relished the intricacies of Ravel's scoring, such as the snarling contrabassoon that depicts the Beast, and the glittering, gamelan-like percussion of the third number, the Empress of the Pagodas.
Benjamin shaped his performance as a whole sequence, and the final number, the Fairy Garden, was a moving culmination: the music grew in a single phrase to a radiant and shattering climax, as if Ravel's fantastical realm had become real.
Benjamin's use of colour in his own music is indebted to French composers such as Ravel, Messiaen, and Boulez, and his 1982 work, At First Light, scored for 14 players, is full of brilliant sounds and sensuous textures.
Colour is a direct inspiration for this piece: the dazzling luminescence of Turner's painting, Norham Castle, Sunrise. In the painting, colours and figures melt into one another; in Benjamin's music, sounds dissolve from solid melodies and gestures into fluid glissandos and unstable registers.
The structure of the whole piece is similarly volatile, and the long final movement is structured as a series of waves that crests in an apocalyptic tam-tam stroke. Benjamin released an overwhelming power from the SCO players, as if they were 40 rather than 14 players. After this climax subsided, delicate violin harmonics hovered over silence before a final, unexpected flourish.
Benjamin brought the same expressive intensity to his performance of Webern's Symphony, Op 21. Instead of the ruthless mathematical abstraction usually associated with this composer, Benjamin gave the first movement a warm, even romantic, lyricism. The variations in the second movement traversed a musical range from miniature marches to frenetic toccatas, all within two minutes.
Along with these commemorations of the music he loves, there was a more direct homage in his performance of Alexander Goehr's... Kein Gedanke, Nur Ruhiger Schlaf, a haunting miniature composed in memory of Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen taught both Goehr and Benjamin, and Benjamin studied with Goehr at Cambridge; a lineage that Benjamin's music both celebrates and transcends.
