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George Benjamin festivities - June 2010 Benjamin’s 50th birthday celebrations hit a crescendo in June when he is featured composer at not one but two prominent festivals! Benjamin is this year's Music Director for California's Ojai festival, where three works by the composer were heard throughout the four-day, six-concert event, from 10-16 June. Also at this time, the 63rd Aldeburgh Festival began with another chance to see the Opera Group's staging of Benjamin's ‘Into the Little Hill’, followed by several concerts presenting a broad scope of Benjamin’s oeuvre. Ojai Press Comments: ‘A small masterpiece’ ‘This year’s festival did not break new ground so much as rearrange the old ground. British composer George Benjamin visited the valley for the first time as music director, but he is as if born to the Ojai tradition. Ensemble Modern from Frankfurt, Germany, was the resident band. As one of Europe’s most admired new music groups, it too fit right in, despite the surprising fact that the 30-year-old ensemble was making its West Coast debut. Benjamin proved a gentle and gentlemanly presence, a refined, generous musician of many sides. …A devotee of Indian thought and music, Benjamin brought in the consummate sarode player, Aashish Kahn, for morning, noon and late night ragas. A film buff and superb pianist, the composer improvised an accompaniment to a DVD screening in the Ojai Theatre of the 1932 classic “Vampyr,” by Danish director Carl T. Dreyer. A student of Messiaen, Benjamin included a Saturday morning performance by Eric Huebner of the French composer’s 130-minute cycle, “Vingt Regards sur L’Enfant-Jésus,” and Benjamin conducted Messiaen’s “Oiseaux Exotiques” Sunday afternoon. He indulged his love for the viola and Purcell with the latter's Fantasias for viols (performed by Wildcat Viols) and by his own “Viola, Viola” for two players. He acknowledged Stravinsky’s history with the festival, as well as Boulez’s. He threw in Schoenberg, Carter and Ligeti for good measure, Frank Zappa for some other kind of measure. Oliver Knussen’s “Requiem – Songs for Sue,” was a radiant, apt tribute to Sue Knussen, a former education director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But the festival will be mainly remembered for the West Coast premiere of Benjamin’s first and so far only opera, “Into the Little Hill,” which was given in a concert performance Saturday night. A condensed, modernized version of the Pied Piper story, the chamber opera is modest in scope. It lasts less than 40 minutes and was written for soprano and mezzo-soprano, who must be narrators, crowd, children, the Minister and his wife. The rats, scurrying and perhaps a bit too vividly imagined for a park performance, are left to 15 musicians. With an elusive and singable libretto by British playwright Martin Crimp, “Into the Little Hill” deals with the way hidden fears can be desires and the other way around. Exterminate the rats (kill them: they bite, they steal, they foul our property and take our jobs) and you destroy our environment, our future.
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