George Benjamin is one of the outstanding composers of his generation. Born in 1960, Benjamin started to play the piano at the age of seven, and began composing almost immediately. In 1976 he entered the Paris Conservatoire to study with Olivier Messiaen (composition) and Yvonne Loriod (piano), after which he studied under Alexander Goehr at King's College Cambridge.
His first orchestral work, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, was played at the BBC Proms when he was just 20; since then it has achieved a remarkable international performance record, as have his two subsequent works, A Mind of Winter and At First Light. Antara was a commission from IRCAM to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Pompidou centre in 1987. Benjamin conducted the first performances of Sudden Time at the first Meltdown Festival in 1993, and Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra at the 75th Salzburg Festival in 1995.
The LSO and Pierre Boulez gave the world premiere of Palimpsests in 2002 to mark the opening of the LSO's season-long retrospective of his work at the Barbican, "By George", a project which also included the premiere of Shadowlines by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. In recent years there have been numerous other major retrospectives of his work, including Brussels (Ars Musica, 2003), Tokyo (Tokyo Opera City, 2003), Berlin (DSO, 2004-5), Strasbourg (Musica Festival, 2005) Madrid (Spanish National Orchestra, 2005) and the Lucerne (2008).
The centrepoint of a large-scale portrait at the 2006 Festival d'Automne in Paris was his first operatic work, Into the Little Hill, a collaboration with the English playwright Martin Crimp, which has toured widely on both sides of the Atlantic since its premiere and won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2008 Award for Large-Scale Composition. It received its London premiere in a new production - a collaboration between the Opera Group and London Sinfonietta - at the Royal Opera House in February 2009, where it will return in July 2010. His most recent work, Duet for Piano and Orchestra, was commissioned by Roche for the Lucerne Festival. He is currently engaged on a second operatic collaboration with Martin Crimp, to be premiered at the Aix en Provence festival in July 2012.
He has built up a close relationship with the Tanglewood Festival in America since his first appearance there in 1999. As a conductor he regularly appears with some of the world's leading ensembles and orchestras, amongst them the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the BBC Symphony, Philharmonia, Cleveland and Concertgebouw orchestras and the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1999 he made his operatic debut conducting Pelléas et Mélisande at la Monnaie, Brussels. He has conducted numerous world premieres, including important works by Rihm, Chin, Grisey and Ligeti and his repertoire stretches from Schumann and Wagner to Knussen, Abrahamsen and Murail. In January 2010 there were extensive celebrations marking Benjamin’s 50th birthday given by the San Francisco Symphony and at London’s South Bank, and in June he will be in residence at the Ojai Festival in California and at the Aldeburgh festival.
The founding curator of the Southbank’s Meltdown Festival, George Benjamin was artistic consultant to the BBC’s three-year retrospective of twentieth century music, Sounding the Century. He is a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres and is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. An honorary fellow of the Guildhall School, the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music, he was awarded the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester's first ever Schoenberg Prize for composition. He lives in London, and since 2001 has been the Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King‘s College, London.
His works are recorded on Nimbus Records www.wyastone.co.uk, and are published by Faber Music in London www.fabermusic.com