Program Note
George Benjamin started to play the piano at the age of seven, and began composing almost immediately. In 1976, he entered the Paris Conservatoire to study composition with Olivier Messiaen and piano with Yvonne Loriod, after which he studied under Alexander Goehr at King's College in Cambridge. Ever since his first orchestral work, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, was played at the BBC Proms, his compositional voice has found international resonance. The London Symphony Orchestra and Pierre Boulez gave the world premiere of Palimpsests in 2002 to mark the opening of “By George”, that orchestra’s season-long retrospective of Benjamin’s work at the Barbican Center in London. There have been other major retrospectives of his work in Brussels, Tokyo, Berlin, Strasbourg, Madrid, Lucerne, Frankfurt, London, and Milan/Turin.
Benjamin’s first opera, Into the Little Hill, a collaboration with playwright Martin Crimp that was the centerpiece of a large-scale portrait at the 2006 Festival d'Automne in Paris, has toured widely on both sides of the Atlantic since its premiere and won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2008 Award for Large-Scale Composition. His second operatic collaboration with Martin Crimp, Written on Skin, was commissioned and premiered by the Aix en Provence festival, and has subsequently been presented in ten cities worldwide, amongst them the Royal Opera House.
As a conductor Benjamin regularly appears with some of the world's leading ensembles and orchestras, including the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Philharmonia, Cleveland and Concertgebouw orchestras, and the Berlin Philharmonic. He has conducted numerous world premieres, including works by Wolfgang Rihm, Unsuk Chin, Grisey, and Ligeti.
The founding curator of the Southbank’s Meltdown Festival, George Benjamin was artistic consultant to the BBC’s three-year retrospective of twentieth century music, “Sounding the Century”. He is a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres and is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. An honorary fellow of King’s College Cambridge, the Guildhall School, the Royal College and the Royal Academy of Music, he was awarded the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester's first Schoenberg Prize for composition.
In 2010, there were extensive celebrations marking Benjamin’s 50th birthday given by the San Francisco Symphony and at London’s South Bank. Also that year he was awarded a CBE for his services to music and in 2014 he was chosen as Musical America’s composer of the year. He lives in London, and since 2001 has been the Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King‘s College, London.
George Benjamin offers the following note for his Octet:
This piece received its première at my London debut in February 1979 under the auspices of the Redcliffe Concerts of British Music. Sketching was begun only months after the conclusion of my studies with Olivier Messiaen: the Octet was very much my first attempt to integrate all that I had learnt in Paris on an instrumental canvas. The whole work (scored for flute, clarinet, percussion, celesta and four strings) has a general scherzando character, occasionally punctured by moments of lyricism or strident dynamism.