Sir George Benjamin

Born in London in 1960, George Benjamin started composing at the age of seven. He commenced regular music studies in his native city in 1974 and transferred two years later to the Paris Conservatoire to study with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, completing his education under Alexander Goehr at King’s College in Cambridge from 1978 to 1982. Benjamin had his international breakthrough with the orchestral works Ringed by the Flat Horizon, which was introduced at the BBC Proms in 1980, and At First Light (1982). In 2002, Pierre Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra launched a series of portrait concerts at the Barbican Centre in London with the world premiere of Palimpsests. Benjamin presented his first music theater work, Into the Little Hill, in 2006 at the Paris Festival d’Automne. This was followed in 2012 by Written on Skin in Aix-en-Provence, for which he received the International Opera Award. Lessons in Love and Violence premiered at the Royal Opera House in London in 2018. Benjamin conducted the world premiere of Picture a day like this in 2023, again in Aix-en-Provence. He was composer-in-residence at Lucerne Festival in 2008, and there have been series devoted to his works in recent seasons with the Berliner Philharmoniker and at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Stockholm Concert Hall Composer Festival, and Radio France’s Festival Présences, among others. Sir George Benjamin is also a successful conductor and has led ensembles including the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra. He works closely with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Ensemble Modern. Professor of Composition at King’s College London since 2001, Benjamin is a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was raised to the peerage by Queen Elizabeth II in 2017; in 2019 he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his life’s work. He was awarded the Grand Prix artistique of the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca in 2022 and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2023.

George Benjamin made his conducting debut in Lucerne in the summer of 2008 with his opera Into the Little Hill; last performance here was on 1 September 2019 with the orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy in a program including his own Palimpsests as well as works by Rihm and Ammann.

Juli 2024