George Benjamin reached 50 last week, and if anyone was going to put on a concert to mark that milestone, it had to be the London Sinfonietta, which has championed his music since the beginning of his career and worked regularly with him as a conductor. The Manson Ensemble from the Royal Academy of Music supplied extra players, and the programme was all Benjamin – two works from the 1980s juxtaposed with three from the last decade, which he mostly conducted himself.
Benjamin also made a rare appearance as a pianist, kicking things off with a performance of his Piano Figures from 2006, a set of 12 miniatures designed for young players, yet providing a perfect introduction to the preoccupations of his recent music. Viola, Viola, played by Paul Silverthorne and Eniko Magyar, demonstrated his instrumental instincts at their sharpest, fusing the two players into a single super-instrument, though the choreography commissioned by the Southbank Centre from Matthias Sperling added only distraction to what is already a self-sufficient tour de force.
The early orchestral works – the Wallace Stevens setting A Mind of Winter, sung ravishingly by soprano Claire Booth, and the first piece the Sinfonietta commissioned, At First Light, inspired by a Turner painting – remain as immediate as when they were new, almost 30 years ago. Their bold gestures and vivid splashes of colour, wonderfully imagined, may be a young man's extravagance, but the confidence with which the chamber orchestra is handled and the astonishing range of colours Benjamin draws from it have remained hallmarks of his music. That was shown vividly by Palimpsests, the fierce pair of orchestral pieces Benjamin completed in 2002, which also underlined how his preoccupations have shifted – towards harder edges and greater harmonic mobility – while keeping the beauty and wonder of his music intact.
To be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow.
