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Music
George Benjamin at 50
Queen Elizabeth Hall, 7th February, Tel: 0871 663 2588
Howard Skempton Portrait Concert
CBSO Centre Birmingham, 27th February, Tel: 0121 767 4050
One of the good things about Britain’s new music scene is that it isn’t in thrall to a dominant trend. Individualism and eccentricity thrive and the big institutions of new music are refreshingly open to them. Two February concerts prove the point. One, from the London Sinfonietta, is devoted to George Benjamin. This one-time wunderkind, favourite pupil of Olivier Messiaen (doyen of French modernism), burst on the scene as a composer of scintillating, many-layered textures with a fabulously rich harmonic palette. More recent works have revealed a darker, more acerbic strain in the music. Both sides are revealed in the Sinfonietta’s concert, which puts brilliant early works like At First Light next to the more recent Palimpsests.
The other one, from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, focuses on a composer who had no brilliant debut and no starry mentors. For decades, Howard Skempton was a marginal figure, taking tiny scraps of humble material and turning them into witty, sometimes unsettling miniatures. In the 1990s his orchestral piece Lento became a surprise bestseller, and his profile has grown and grown since. The concert includes the premiere of a mini-viola concerto, Only the Sound Remains.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic
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