It is a brave gesture to programme your own music between two of the greatest works of the early 20th century. But for the final concert of his series with the London Symphony Orchestra, George Benjamin placed his Ringed by the Flat Horizon in between Sibelius's Seventh Symphony and Debussy's La Mer.
It proved an inspired combination. Benjamin's work - the piece that launched his career, composed when he was in his late teens - complemented and illuminated the two earlier masterpieces.
Sibelius's Seventh is an essay in economy and compression, but in conductor Antonio Pappano's performance, the piece was as passionate as it was structurally perfect. He coaxed a vivid sensuality from the string section in the archaic polyphony that begins the symphony's epic journey. And while he handled the music's volatile transitions with care and subtlety, he created strong contrasts, from the slow, grandiose trombone theme that is the work's main structural feature to scurrying, folk-like melodies for woodwind and strings.
In the final section, the music accelerates to impossible speeds and then, with a conjuror's deftness, this texture becomes the accompaniment to a final statement of the trombone theme. The fastest music in the whole piece is transformed into the slowest. Pappano made this a spine-tingling moment, unifying the largest and smallest scales of the music.
He crafted the sea and storms of La Mer with painterly precision, moulding the sunrise of the first movement into a blaze of light and unleashing a dazzling play of liquid energy in the second. The winds and waves of the final movement generated an unstoppable momentum, cresting at last in a massive peal of sound.
Benjamin's Ringed by the Flat Horizon was an even more ambitious investigation of musical colour. The 20-minute work is driven by delicate but unpredictable changes of timbre and texture, as fragments of harmony coalesce into limpid, shimmering melodies and huge eruptions of sound. Between the outbursts of tempest and violence, Benjamin's music seems to stop time, as fragments of the storm are suspended in mid-air: a cor anglais melody, an impassioned cello solo.
The work opens and closes with the same gesture, a quiet bell chord, as if the whole piece had been a slow elaboration of a single moment, the still centre of a tornado. Pappano and the LSO were as committed and dynamic in this piece as they were in the rest of the programme, and Benjamin's music was another transfiguration of nature, worthy of its illustrious companion pieces.
