George Benjamin

George Benjamin’s creative talent appeared early. At the age of 20, Benjamin, born in London in 1960, became the youngest composer to be performed at London’s famous Proms with the orchestral work “Ringed by the Flat Horizon”; two other internationally recognised works were performed shortly afterwards. Even these early pieces amazed listeners with their virtuoso instrumentation and remarkable plasticity of form, allowing them to follow the music’s development directly despite its wealth of complex detail. This simple accessibility of his music comes from artistic interests which, as Benjamin put it in an interview in 2008, aim to create structures that are “exciting and tell a story, are unpredictable but logical.”

Benjamin acquired his tools as a composer through private lessons, followed by study with Olivier Messiaen and, from 1978 to 1982, with Alexander Goehr. A significant period after this was spent working at IRCAM, the research studio for electronic music in Paris. Now Benjamin is able to look back on a broad and wide-ranging oeuvre. In recent years he has directed his attention towards opera, for which he would seem to be predestined thanks to his narrative and dramatic inclinations. In 2012 he achieved a breakthrough success with “Written on Skin”, a multi-perspectival drama about a domestic murder. This work, produced many times around the world, was followed in 2018 by “Lessons in Love and Violence”. The world premiere of “Picture a Day Like This” is scheduled for July 2023 in Aix-en-Provence.

Aside from his work as a composer, Benjamin also makes prominent appearances as a practicing musician, primarily as a conductor who collaborates regularly with a series of prestigious orchestras. Here he has gained considerable acclaim for his world premieres of works by other composers and his sustained advocacy of 20th and 21st century music. Benjamin was knighted in 2017 and was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2023.

As of June 2023.