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), 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, , Peter glowing light. Musically, it makes one think of a Debussy Image or a Ravel Miroir, both Eötvös and . 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. Above all, we get a music of constant change and, as one might say, interference, a music that is by no means passive or blended, but active, volatile, at times abrasive. It invokes Varèse as much as Debussy, the Schoenberg of the Five Pieces, op.16, as much as Ravel. Sudden Time was Benjamin’s next idea for an orchestral work. He started sketching it in 1983, the year after At First Light, but something in the conception raised technical problems that for a time resisted solution, and it seems to have been this blockage that Photo by: Michiharu Okubo2003 caused the relatively fallow period of the late eighties. In January 1990 a short George Benjamin conducting Palimpsests in Tokyo, May 2003

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Ensemble Modern orchestral work called Cascade was premiered at a concert in Hull as part of a national tour by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, was then subsequently withdrawn, then Ensemble Modern Orchestra finally re-emerged in 1993 as the opening part of Sudden Time. “This short orchestral study,” Benjamin wrote laconically of Cascade, “is constructed from the simplest Formed in 1980, Ensemble Modern (EM) is one of the world’s leading ensembles for musical materials: scales, triads, rhythmic and melodic fragments. These basic cells new music. EM has been based in Frankfurt am Main since 1985 and currently constantly transform and flow through the whole orchestra in streams of sound - comprises 19 soloists from nine countries. It is known for its unique mode of working hence the title.” Nothing could better illustrate the vagaries of musical titling, and the and organization: there is no artistic director, and all decisions concerning projects, difficulty of relating musical process to visual or material concepts. In the end guest musicians, co-productions and financial matters are taken jointly. EM not only Benjamin abandoned the attempt, and instead named his work from a line in Wallace appears in the outstanding performing venues of Germany but has also toured to Stevens’s “Martial Cadenza” inspired by a vision of the evening star as an image of Russia, South America, the USA, Japan, Australia, India, Korea and Taiwan. It eternal recurrence, “like sudden time in a world without time.” participates regularly in such renowned festivals as New York’s Lincoln Center, Turin’s settembre musica, the Festival d’Automne à Paris, Festival Ars Musica in The whole idea of this fifteen-minute work for large orchestra is derived from the Brussels and Holland Festival in Amsterdam, as well as at the festivals of Lucerne and nature of music itself. Everyone knows that musical time is different from everyday - Berlin. In 2003 the ensemble was declared a “beacon” of contemporary culture in ontological - time: that music manipulates our sense of time passing, speeds it up, Germany by the federal government’s cultural foundation; from 2004 the foundation slows it down, seems to inhabit time in a different way from ordinary experience, will be supporting two important EM projects: the Ensemble Modern Orchestra and whatever that may be. Benjamin describes a dream he once had, “in which the sound the International Ensemble Modern Academy. The Academy, founded in 2003, is of a thunderclap seemed to stretch to at least a minute’s duration before suddenly dedicated to the promotion of contemporary music through the most varied forms of circulating, as if in a spiral, through my head. I then woke, and realised that I was in research and teaching as well as by turning the musical experiences and expertise of fact experiencing merely the first second of a real thunderclap. I had perceived it in EM to fruitful advantage for the young generation. dreaming, in between and in real time.” (Wales might claim this dream; Benjamin stayed in Caerleon in 1984 and was woken in the middle of the night by a violent The Ensemble Modern Orchestra (EMO), founded in 1998, is the first orchestra in the thunderstorm, which he remembers to this day.) world devoted exclusively to the performance of 20th - and 21st century music. The orchestra’s core is made up of the 19 soloists of Ensemble Modern, who are joined by The conception of time as an elastic substance which can stretch from the musicians from all over the world, including both young instrumentalists and New instantaneous to the long drawn-out is vividly represented in the initial bars of Sudden Music specialists. The EMO regularly commissions new compositions – for example, Time. Music is never either static or mobile, of course; such descriptions can only be it has given first performances of Heiner Goebbels’s Walden, Michael Gordon’s metaphorical. But Benjamin’s opening bassoon melody does nevertheless suggest Sunshine of Your Life, Hanspeter Kyburz’s Piano Concerto and John Adams’s Naïve and both qualities. In that it flows in an erratic motion and over a wide dynamic range, it Sentimental Music. The EMO’s ambitious concert programmes juxtapose new implies change and instability; in that it starts and finishes on the same note and with compositions with pivotal works of modern music. The orchestra has been conducted the same loudness (ppp - f - ff - ppp), is metrically vague, and is freely echoed by two

12 5 NI 5732 NI 5732 different cello parts, it may seem to rotate rather than progress. Immediately, complex Oliver Knussen orchestral music spirals away from it, like the wash of a boat, creating eddies and irregular undercurrents which soon carry the music into new waters and at constantly Oliver Knussen’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated in 2002 with three retrospective changing speeds. The idea is of a continually varying musical density (in the concerts in London and special concerts in Cleveland and Amsterdam, confirming his instantaneous sense) and a continually varying structural density, from minute to position at the forefront of the international contemporary music scene. His music minute. It’s as if Benjamin had seized on the graphic eventfulness of At First Light and occupies a respected and regularly revisited place in concert and opera programmes rethought it in musical terms as a coherent, linear discourse. Sudden Time is held worldwide. And as an acclaimed and much-invited conductor, the force of his together, Benjamin insists, “by the fact that all material, however plain or elaborate, is presence and influence on contemporary music has been felt in many parts of the based on a few musical cells of great simplicity” (compare this with his description of world. Cascade). What one hears, though, is something more like an ongoing process of Oliver Knussen’s achievements are reflected in his former posts as Co-Artistic Director controlled change, whereby fresh material keeps emerging with new movement and of the Aldeburgh Festival, Principal Guest Conductor of the Residentie Orchestra and new sonorities from the dense weave of the previous texture. And this is the purpose Head of Contemporary Music Activities at Tanglewood. Since 1981 he has been of the very large orchestra, including a huge percussion section with many pitched responsible for more than 200 world and local premieres. He has also made a number instruments, quadruple brass, and a number of oddities such as the tiny so-called of award-winning recordings, most frequently with the London Sinfonietta of whom Gartlein recorder. Benjamin is quite ready to make a lot of noise; but most of all he – following a highly successful period as Music Director – he is now the Conductor needs the orchestra to give him the extremely intricate, multi-stranded textures Laureate. necessitated by the fundamental idea of the work. The mastery of Sudden Time, achieved with great effort over a time that was anything but sudden, is that of the Forthcoming conducting work is characterised by repeated re-invitations and apparently effortless command of these complex resources at any given moment, and sustained relationships: the Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Toronto over a long succession of moments. Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, ASKO and the Schoenberg Ensemble; regular visits to Japan; and BBC Promenade The passage of time is equally a preoccupation of the more recent Palimpsests, which Concerts. In July 2002 he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic takes its name from a type of old manuscript where the original text has been Society and received an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Scottish Academy of overwritten, perhaps more than once, in such a way that the various layers of writing Music and Drama. In 1994 was invited to become an Honorary Member of the remain discernible, if not necessarily decipherable. The first part was composed as a American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was made a C.B.E. in the June 1994 75th birthday present for Pierre Boulez, who conducted its first performance in Birthday Honours. London in February 2000. The second part was played for the first time, also by the London Symphony Orchestra under Boulez, at the opening concert in the orchestra’s Since 1994 Mr Knussen has recorded an acclaimed series of recordings of 20th century “By George” series at London’s Barbican Hall in October 2002. However, the two parts music for Deutsche Grammophon including music by Carter, Crawford–Seeger, belong together and are connected, like the first two movements of At First Light, by a Henze, Kagel, Lieberson, Lindberg, Matthews, Stravinsky, Takemitsu, Wuorinen, and conducted silence. his own operatic Double Bill Higglety Pigglety Pop! and Where the Wild Things Are.

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September 1997 as part of the festival inaugurating the opening of Tokyo Opera City. Apalimpsest is a form of vertical time, a sort of literary archaeological dig, and for Palimpsests, written for Pierre Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra, was Benjamin this at once suggests musical layering. His orchestra is again substantial, but premiered in October 2002 at the first night of the LSO’s season-long retrospective of his rather in the nature of a large chamber orchestra, with some idiosyncratic choices and work, ‘BY GEORGE!’; the same piece subsequently won the Royal Philharmonic omissions. There are four each of flutes and clarinets, but no double reeds (oboes, Society’s large-scale composition award. 2003 saw the première of Shadowlines, the fruit bassoons) except for a lone contrabassoon; the standard brass are all represented of many years of collaboration with the French pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard. (including five trumpets), but the string section includes no cellos, and is otherwise soloistic: five violins, three violas, eight double basses. There are percussion, piano In June 2001, Benjamin was appointed Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King’s and a pair of harps. Clearly the composer wants to think in terms of individual colours College, London. He was Artistic Consultant to “Sounding the Century”, BBC Radio 3’s spreading into families, in order to preserve the integrity of each layer. This is obvious retrospective of 20th Century Music – a three-year series of nationwide concerts and at the start, where the clarinets perform an antique-sounding canzonetta, presumably broadcasts. He has been awarded the title of Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et lettres by the the original text of the palimpsest soon to be overlaid by a confusion of “later” French government for his outstanding contribution to French musical life. He was also inscriptions. From time to time this or related material re-emerges from the changing recently elected to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and, in 2001, was awarded the texture. Deutsche Sinfonie’s first ever Schoenberg prize for Composition. Apalimpsest, like a painting, is an object, even if it embodies a process of a kind. A George Benjamin’s career as a conductor is no less distinguished than his standing as a musical palimpsest might consist of one idea overlaid by another and another and so composer and he has led orchestras and ensembles throughout the world both in his on; but artistically such a process would not have much point (it would not be the own and other music. In 1999 he made his opera debut conducting Pelléas et Mélisande same as traditional polyphony, which imposes rules on the relationship between the to great acclaim with La Monnaie de Munt in Brussels. Benjamin has conducted different lines). So once a composer like Benjamin appropriates the palimpsest as a important premieres by Ligeti, Grisey and Rihm amongst many others and he maintains conceptual idea, he is bound to do something that is not inherent in the thing itself. a long-standing relationship with the London Sinfonietta. In the 2002-3 season What he makes is what one might call an interactive palimpsest, one in which the conducting engagements included the LSO and the Cleveland and Concertgebouw original “inscription” itself undergoes change in the light of the texts which are orchestras; future seasons include retrospectives of his works in Berlin, and superimposed on it. In this way the palimpsest becomes four-dimensional, an object Madrid. with depth that also passes through time. At this point, of course, the analogy more or less completely breaks down. The only kind of temporal change a real-life palimpsest undergoes is decay, whereas Benjamin’s Palimpsests are engaged in a process of dynamic change and growth. Each movement offers its own version of this process, but elements of the first piece are present in the second, and eventually, in Benjamin’s words, “as the music propels itself towards a surprise conclusion, elements from both Palimpsests collide and combine.” There is perhaps a hint of anxiety in his alternative description of this marvellous work as “something akin to dusk or dawn

10 7 NI 5732 NI 5732 in the desert, or at high altitude in winter, when the sun is very low and the light George Benjamin almost horizontal, and crystal clear.” This is still the country of At First Light. But Palimpsests has entered new terrain. George Benjamin was born in 1960, started piano lessons at the age of seven and composing when he was nine. In 1976, after three years with Peter Gellhorn , he went Olicantus, a short chamber work for fifteen players written as a surprise fiftieth to Paris to study composition with Olivier Messiaen and piano with Yvonne Loriod at birthday present for the composer-conductor Oliver Knussen in June 2002, nicely the Paris Conservatoire. Later, at King’s College Cambridge, he studied under sums up the ambitious journey of the preceding works. Here, in a discreet texture of Alexander Goehr. low-lying or low-set instruments - clarinets and flutes again prominent, a cello reinstated, but no brass except horn and still no oboes or bassoons - Benjamin presents Benjamin first came to public prominence attention in 1980 when his large orchestral his palimpsest idea in capsule form and stripped of its more dynamic elements. The work Ringed by the Flat Horizon was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under “cantus” of the title is heard at once on a pair of bass clarinets, in free canon with a Mark Elder at the BBC Proms. His two subsequent works, A Mind of Winter and At First double-stopped solo cello. Later it is modified, elaborated and overlaid, but never Light, were for smaller forces; the latter has become a repertoire work for ensembles all quite lost. The texture is subdued and hardly ever rises above mezzo piano. It is an round the world since its première by the London Sinfonietta. odd thought that Olicantus calls for one player more than the dazzling and sometimes Benjamin’s next important work, Antara, was an IRCAM commission for the Ensemble rowdy At First Light. Intercontemporain to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Pompidou Centre. © 2004 Stephen Walsh Benjamin’s reputation has flourished in France and the country has almost become a second home to him. Benjamin’s music has been widely performed in America; in recent years the orchestras George Benjamin & Ensemble Modern in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, Chicago and Boston have programmed his AEuropean tour in the autumn of 1993 initiated what was to become a close and music. He frequently conducts there and has built up a particularly close relationship highly productive relationship between George Benjamin and the Ensemble Modern, with the Tanglewood Festival. and since then he has returned to work with them on a regular basis. The choice of After directing a month-long new music venture with the San Francisco Symphony repertoire has been wide, ranging from Messiaen to Donatoni, Carter to Knussen and Orchestra in 1992, London’s South Bank Centre invited him to curate the first Boulez to Rihm. Benjamin’s own music has also featured frequently, and he directed ‘Meltdown’ festival in July 1993. This included the premiere of his long-awaited the world premiere of his Three Inventions with the ensemble at the opening concert of orchestral work, Sudden Time, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. the 1995 Salzburg Festival. Benjamin has conducted the expanded forces of the Ensemble Modern Orchestra on several occasions and the performances of Sudden In July 1995, he conducted the world première of Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra Time and Palimpsests on this disc were recorded during their tours in 2000 and 2003. at the 75th Salzburg Festival. The first ever concert in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall featured the premiere of Sometime Voices, given by and the Halle Orchestra. Viola, Viola has been taken up by a host of duos since its first performance in

8 9 GEORGE BENJAMIN • PALIMPSESTS Nimbus ENSEMBLE MODERN • ENSEMBLE MODERN ORCHESTRA NI 5732 4.04 14.37 conducts 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited P Made in the UK by Nimbus Records © 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited http://www.wyastone.co.uk LC 5871 Total playing timeTotal 57.26 Olicantus conducted by Oliver Knussen Performance given in Frankfurt, Frankfurt 17 January 2003 at the Alte Oper By permission hrMedia, Frankfurt Sudden Time Performance given in Frankfurt, Oper Frankfurt 28 February 2000 at the Alte By permission of hrMedia, Frankfurt Performance given in the Mozarteum, Salzburg, Performance given in the Mozarteum, 27 July 1995 at the Salzburg Festival. the Salzburg Festival and of Wien By permission of ORF, At First Light At First Light I9.29 II III 2.12 7.22 I11.35 II recording Première the Ars Musica Festival. at the opening concert of Performance given Studio 4. 2003, Flagey, in Brussels, 6 March Recorded 3 Musique of Ars Musica and of RTBF By permission 8.05 Palimpsests GEORGE BENJAMIN BENJAMIN GEORGE 7 6 4 5 3 1 2

GEORGE BENJAMIN • PALIMPSESTS Nimbus ENSEMBLE MODERN • ENSEMBLE MODERN ORCHESTRA NI 5732