LPO/Benjamin review – music of crystalline clarity and hedonistic pleasure

George Benjamin conducted this meticulously programmed and beautifully executed concert of his own Palimpsests alongside music by Scriabin, Stravinsky and Ravel

Shimmering colours, translucent textures and illuminating shafts of light were the order of the day as the London Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence George Benjamin donned his conductor’s hat, bringing his trademark rigour and precision to a meticulously programmed concert of Scriabin, Stravinsky, Ravel and Benjamin himself.

Sensuality ruled in Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy, a single-movement symphonic ode to joy. Languorous strings and woodwind indulged in voluptuous foreplay, spurred on by priapic brass, only to fall back repeatedly as if momentarily sated. Benjamin exerted an impressive control over his vast forces – nine horns, no less – refining the composer’s unrestrained textures before ramping up the adrenaline for a climactic explosion of hedonistic pleasure.

He brought a similar crystalline clarity to Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, highlighting its startling modernity as if dissecting the fleshless remnants of a deconstructed The Rite of Spring. The LPO, impressive throughout, laid bare the score with the exactitude of a surgeon’s knife. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Ravel’s Mother Goose was presented complete rather than in the usual suite form, every detail cleanly defined. The rarely heard connecting sections were of special interest as Benjamin led the way from Sleeping Beauty’s graceful pavane to the flirtatious chuntering of Beauty and the Beast, the latter burbling away on a delightfully ungainly contrabassoon. The pentatonic tinkling of the Empress of the Pagodas and the throbbing intensity of The Fairy Garden brought the music to its iridescent conclusion.

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which one or more later texts have been inscribed on top of an original piece of writing. It’s an idea that could be applied to a great deal of Benjamin’s own work as a composer, making Palimpsest I and its darker cousin, Palimpsest II signature works. An unconventional orchestral layout – eight basses but no cellos, harps, celesta, a large brass section and an ethereal group of upper strings that sounded at times as if they were on helium – makes these unusually visual pieces, their inner workings revealed most effectively in live performance. Benjamin was authoritative here, crafting the music’s tectonic shifts while bringing out its startling peculiarities and rare beauty.