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Ringed by the Imaginative George Benjamin

Georgia Rowe on January 16, 2010
It’s always fascinating to hear where composers are coming from, as well as where they’re going. This week’s San Francisco Symphony program offered an intriguing case in point: As part of George Benjamin’s current residency with the orchestra, the English composer appeared on the podium to conduct two of his own works — one early and one recent — as well as music by two of his primary influences, Messiaen and Ravel.
George Benjamin

The principal attraction was the West Coast premiere of Benjamin’s 2008 piano concerto Duet, with Nicolas Hodges as soloist. It was paired with one of Benjamin’s seminal works: Ringed by the Flat Horizon(1980). Ravel’s La Mère l’oye (Mother Goose) and Rapsodie espagnole, along with Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques, completed the lineup.

With the composer conducting, Thursday’s matinee performance amounted to an engaging double exposure to Benjamin’s career progression. It was also a thoughtfully conceived sequel to last week’s program, which featured two Benjamin works — Jubilation, composed in 1985, and Dance Figures, from 2004 — conducted with enormous panache by David Robertson.

Both concerts were part of the Symphony’s Project San Francisco, a residency program designed to foster appreciation of composers and musicians. The program goes in-depth with the kind of focus rarely heard on subscription concerts; Benjamin, who made his Symphony debut in 1992 as music director of the Wet Ink music festival, is the subject of what amounts to a miniretrospective with this residency. Related events include a chamber concert (Jan. 17), plus preperformance discussions and master classes with students at both UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. (Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the project’s next resident, will participate in a similar series of events Jan. 20-26.)

Thursday’s program was rare enough, simply for the chance to hear two Benjamin works in a single sitting. But it also revealed much about the composer’s musical lineage and continuing stylistic preoccupations. Messiaen, of course, was essential to his development: Benjamin entered the Paris Conservatoire as a teenager and became a favorite pupil of the French master. It was not surprising, then, that Messiaen’s 1956 Oiseaux, which hadn’t been performed by the SFS since 1984, emerged as a revelation. But it has also been some time since Bay Area audiences have heard Ravel’s music sounding so lush, luxuriant, and brilliantly detailed.

Striking Sonic Symbiosis

Still, Benjamin the composer was the central figure on the program, and Duet didn’t disappoint. It is a work of striking imagination and intensity — one that rejects the Romantic notion of the concerto as an adversarial relationship between piano and orchestra in favor of a more symbiotic one. Cast in a single movement, the score places the soloist on a parallel track with the ensemble in a dense, flinty study in timbral and textural contrasts. The writing for orchestra is starkly atmospheric, with the voices of muted trumpets, brooding low strings, woodwinds, and celesta (there are no violins) occasionally emerging. Against this backdrop the piano, which remains in a confined register throughout, comes across with startling clarity; Hodges, responding to Benjamin’s direction, negotiated the work’s demands with chilly precision.

Ringed by the Flat Horizon, making its long-overdue debut on an SFS program, registers as a more diffuse creation, though Thursday’s 20-minute performance held the listener in its grip from start to finish. This was Benjamin’s first major work for orchestra; taking its title from T.S. Eliot’s touchstone poem The Waste Land, it evokes a sense of vast space and immeasurable passage of time (the composer was inspired, in part, by a photograph of a New Mexico thunderstorm).

The work starts in a state of acute tension; the sound of clouds gathering in the distance yields to agitated bursts of chimes, woodwinds, and violins. The atmosphere is pierced by a melody for solo cello (played tenderly by Amos Yang), followed by a series of violent climaxes and an uneasy coda. Throughout, the composer keeps his thematic material in constant flux, melding and morphing it to kaleidoscopic effect and summoning radiant flashes of light; the work may have derived from an American scene, but its palette is unmistakably French. Benjamin conducted with exquisite focus, and the orchestra responded with a marvel of a performance.

The composer’s decision to frame his own works with Ravel’s music was a telling one. La Mère l’oye which opened the program, introduced Benjamin the conductor as a superb colorist, one who didn’t lead the performance so much as let it unfold at an organic pace; whisper-soft woodwinds and silky strings were the reward, with Concertmaster Nadja Tichman and principal violist Jonathan Vinocour supplying affecting solos. Benjamin emphasized the rapturous, dreamlike qualities of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, bringing the score’s wonted sensuality to the fore with admirable restraint.

At the center of the program was Oiseaux exotiques. Messiaen’s homage to birds and nature is a dazzling tableau vivant, with the tweet and clatter of woodwinds depicting the rustle of avian life and the lapidary sounds of percussion creating an active backdrop. With Hodges as the excellent soloist, Benjamin conducted with great affection and sensitivity. The Symphony’s hardworking percussion section doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves, but it earned garlands here.