GEORGE BENJAMIN Palimpsests
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NI 5732 GEORGE BENJAMIN Also available by George Benjamin on Nimbus: NI 5505 Palimpsests Three Inventions, Upon Silence, Sudden Time Susan Bickley & Fretwork, London Sinfonietta and London Philharmonic conducted by the composer. NI 5643 A Mind of Winter, Antara, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, At First Light, Panorama Penelope Walmsley-Clarke, BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder, and London Sinfonietta conducted by the composer. NI 5713 Shadowlines (Pierre-Laurent Aimard - piano) Viola, Viola (Tabea Zimmermann & Antoine Tamestit) Piano Sonata & Three Studies for piano (George Benjamin - piano) P 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited © 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited Cover photograph: The Smarmore Slate (A15th century Musical Palimpsest), Ensemble Modern courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland. Design: [email protected] 16 Ensemble Modern Orchestra NI 5732 NI 5732 Juditha Haeberlin ST Viola Marc Froncoux ST George Benjamin conducts Kirsten Harms ST Susan Knight P / ST / O Zoë Martlew ST Diana Kiendl ST Paul de Clerck AFL Saskia Ogilvy ST Palimpsests Tobias Rempe ST Nancy Sullivan P Daniel Petrovitsch ST 1 I 8.05 Inken Renner ST Mechthild Sommer P Valerie Rubin ST Geneviève Strosser ST Double Bass 2 II 11.35 Claudia Sack ST Ralf Ehlers ST Matthew McDonald P Première recording Aki Sauliere ST Miriam Götting ST Thomas Fichter AFL / ST Performance given at the opening concert of the Ars Musica Festival. Sif Tulinius ST Juliet Jopling ST Peter Schlier P / O Recorded in Brussels, 6 March 2003, Flagey, Studio 4. Maya Bickel ST Julia Knight ST Corin Long P By permission of Ars Musica and of RTBF Musique 3 Gregor Dierck ST David Schlage ST Felix von Tippelskirch P At First Light Thomas Glöckner ST Nikolaus Schlierf ST David Cooper P Ada Gosling ST Erkki Veltheim ST Pedro Gadelha P 3 I 2.12 Corinna Guthmann ST Konrad von Coelln ST Anne Hofmann P / ST 4 II 9.29 Corinna Jakoby ST Olga Karpusina P 5 III 7.22 Christine Krapp ST Violoncello Joseph Carver ST Performance given in the Mozarteum, Salzburg, 27 July 1995 at the Salzburg Festival. Daniel Künzler ST Eva Böcker ST Johannes Nied ST By permission of ORF, Wien and of the Salzburg Festival Olvido Lanza ST Michael M. Kasper ST / O Peter Schlier ST Silke Meyer-Eggen ST Michael Stirling AFL Michael Tiepold ST 6 Sudden Time 14.37 Heide Sibley ST Anna Carewe ST Performance given in Frankfurt, 28 February 2000 at the Alte Oper Frankfurt Elena Diane Cheah ST By permission of hrMedia, Frankfurt 7 Olicantus 4.04 conducted by Oliver Knussen The musicians of the Ensemble Modern are grateful for the support of the Aventis Foundation Performance given in Frankfurt, 17 January 2003 at the Alte Oper Frankfurt in financing the costs of one chair in its orchestra. By permission hrMedia, Frankfurt Total playing time 57.26 All works published by Faber Music Ltd. www.fabermusic.co.uk Nimbus Records would like to thank the following organisations for their kind support of this project; Ars Musica (www.arsmusica.be); RTBF Musique 3; ORF, Wien; the Salzburg Festival; hrMedia, Frankfurt. www.ensemble-modern.com Thanks also to Anna Kenyon at Faber, and Lisa Battersby at Askonas Holt for their generous assistance. 2 15 NI 5732 NI 5732 Ensemble Modern & Ensemble Modern Orchestra George Benjamin was only twenty when an orchestral work of his, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, was played at a BBC Prom in London in the summer of 1980. Just over two years later, in November 1982, a specially commissioned chamber-orchestral piece by Flute Horn Percussion Dietmar Wiesner P / AFL / ST Frank Ollu AFL / O Rumi Ogawa P / ST him, At First Light, had its premiere in a London Sinfonietta concert in St.John’s, Smith Christiane Albert O Simon Breyer P / O Rainer Römer ST / O Square. The two scores were so imaginatively conceived and so skilfully executed that Rüdiger Jacobsen O Christine Chapman P Boris Müller AFL / ST it seemed natural to expect a crescendo of major works from this young Cambridge Carina Vogel P Luiz Garcia P Timothy Phillips O graduate, a one-time pupil of Messiaen and of Messiaen’s pupil Alexander Goehr. In Sascha Friedl P / ST Jonathan Williams ST David Haller P fact in the ensuing years Benjamin completed comparatively little of any note. There Erik Drescher P Frank Lloyd ST Konrad Graf P Martin Fahlenbock ST Jozsef Hars ST Niklas Brommare ST were some piano studies, and a twenty-minute ensemble work called Antara, using Christian von Borries ST Thomas Baumgärtel ST Dennis Kuhn ST computer-extended panpipe sounds worked out during a stint at the IRCAM studios Pascal Pons ST in Paris between 1984-87, and a beautiful ten-minute Yeats setting, Upon Silence, for Oboe/Cor Anglais Trumpet mezzo-soprano and viol consort. But this was a fairly modest harvest for a whole Catherine Milliken AFL / ST Valentín Garvie P Piano/Celeste decade of endeavour by a supposedly fluent young composer. What had become of Christian Hommel ST Sava Stoianov P Ueli Wiget P / AFL / ST / O Joseph Sanders ST William Forman AFL / ST Josef Christof ST the apparently effortless brilliance of those works that had first established Benjamin’s Markus Schwind P / ST reputation? The answer, as might have been expected, was that the brilliance was not Clarinet Anders Nyquist P Harp as effortless as it seemed, but the product of a meticulous process of selection and self- Roland Diry P / AFL / ST / O Andras Olsen Ellen Wegner O criticism in the evolution of a personal, individual technique. Wolfgang Stryi (also Bass Trumpet) P Manon Morris P (Bass & Contra-bass Clarinet) ST Bruce Nockles ST Ernestine Stoop P At First Light is written for a chamber orchestra of fourteen, but with a much greater Karin Dornbusch Michael Feldner ST Gabriela Mossyrsch ST range of instrumental colour than that somewhat unpromising number might suggest. (also Bass Clarinet) O Ursula Holliger ST Apart from the oboe, the woodwind all play two or more different instruments, the John Corbett P Trombone Shizuyo Oka P Uwe Dierksen P / AFL Violin trumpet doubles on high piccolo trumpet in D, trumpet and trombone deploy a Helen Pierce P Andrew Digby P / ST Jagdish Mistry P / AFL / ST / O variety of mutes, and there is a spectacular percussion section including piano, celesta, Ib Hausmann Tim Beck ST Peter Rundel AFL vibraphone, an assortment of gongs, blocks, whips and cymbals (though oddly (also Bass Clarinet) ST Alexander Kowalsky ST Swantje Tessmann ST / O enough only a single side-drum and no timpani), and a few stage props of doubtful Nina Janßen ST Amos Miller Barbara Bultmann P / ST pedigree and mysterious function, a “ping-pong ball with flat-bottomed drinking (also Bass Trombone) ST Darragh Morgan P Bassoon/ Contra bassoon Ulrike Stortz P glass” and a large newspaper. All this suggests a music of crystalline, kaleidoscopic Johannes Rupe P / ST Tuba Verena Sommer P colour, in which individual timbre is more important than blended sonority. As it Noriko Shimada AFL / ST Jozsef Juhasz P Muriel Cantoreggi ST happens, the work was inspired by a late painting by Turner, his Norham Castle, Nicole Tait ST Sasha Johnson ST Marcus Barcham-Stevens ST Sunrise, in the Tate Gallery. The picture, which is reproduced on the cover of the score, Chris George ST is one of those Turners in which solid objects - a castle, a river-bank, a pair of cows, 14 3 NI 5732 NI 5732 even the rising sun - seem to have “melted” (Benjamin’s own word) in a mist of by such outstanding figures as John Adams, George Benjamin, Pierre Boulez, Peter glowing light. Musically, it makes one think of a Debussy Image or a Ravel Miroir, both Eötvös and Ingo Metzmacher. composers Benjamin admires. “Abstractly,” he says, “this observation [about the objects having melted] has been very important to the way I have composed the piece. Ensemble Modern is funded through Deutsche Ensemble Akademie e.V. by the City of A‘solid object’ can be formed as a punctuated, clearly defined musical phrase. This can Frankfurt, the country of Hessia, the GEMAFoundation, the GVL and be ‘melted’ into a flowing, nebulous continuum of sound.” At the same time, in a more conventionally programmatic way, the music is “a contemplation of dawn, a celebration of the colours and noises of daybreak” (as in Debussy’s Ibéria, perhaps). So (Federal Cultural Foundation, Germany) it both represents the picture and translates its techniques. The tours of Ensemble Modern Orchestra under the baton of George Benjamin were Music, being a form of discourse, is essentially unlike painting. It’s curious how we sponsored by : associate colour effects like those in the Turner with certain types of musical texture, even though we rarely equate their opposites - the dramatic violence of Goya, say, and that of Beethoven. ADebussyImage is like a three-dimensional picture that you walk through to experience, the time taken being the crucial medium of the architecture. In Benjamin’s case, the temporal structure makes requirements of the musical material which in the event take it outside the realms of soft impressionism. To sustain a twenty-minute design, he evidently felt, you need ideas that fly off the musical canvas in a series of dynamic episodes whose trajectory is the main determinant of the musical form. Hence in At First Light, we get a succession of ideas and gestures that are anything but blurred or indefinite like the Turner painting; we get a three-movement form in which a certain tense quiescence, perhaps comparable to the picture’s expectant radiance, is achieved only at the start of the third movement.