Over the past weekend, Sir George Benjamin made his conducting debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker. The two concerts, on Saturday and Sunday, marked also the inauguration of Benjamin’s tenure as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence.
Benjamin is only the second composer to hold the title, following John Adams, the composer-in-residence of the orchestra’s 16/17 season. Over the course of the new season, several of Benjamin’s works will be performed by the orchestra and its various chamber groups, as well as several guest artists.
As usual for Benjamin, these concerts have been programmed with great care, in order to create logical continuums with Benjamin’s own music and works of other composers, mostly from the 20th century.
Benjamin’s debut concerts featured an absolutely brilliant selection of works, ranging from Maurice Ravel’s towering masterpiece, Piano Concerto in D Major for the Left Hand (1929-30), via two splendid 1970s pieces of voices and orchestra, Pierre Boulez’ enchantingly sensual Cummings ist der Dichter (1970/1986) and György Ligeti’s mesmerizing Clocks and Clouds (1972-73), to Benjamin’s riveting study of musical layers, Palimpsests (1998-2002).
Each of these pieces demonstrate utmost sonic invention with their profoundly detailed instrumentation and luminous harmonic language, creating an unifying aura for the whole programme.
As a concert opener, Boulez’ Cummings ist der Dichter for voices and orchestra received its first ever performance with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Setting a text from E. E. Cummings’ 1935 collection No Thanks, Boulez embarks on a fascinating compositional journey, marvellously reflecting the unique nature of this remarkable poetic universe.
Scored for sixteen solo voices and an orchestra of fifteen wind and brass players, three harps and a string septet, Cummings ist der Dichter is clad in spellbinding sonorities, ideally suited for Cummings’ phonetic realm.
In Boulez’ musical imagination, the short text is conjured into sounding vocal and instrumental reality with riveting poignancy, colour and beauty. Among Boulez’ oeuvre, Cummings ist der Dichter is unparalleled in its sheer expressive immediacy. The textures alternate between static harmonic clouds and sharp, rapid bursts of accentuated passages, always perfectly in line with the text.
United under Benjamin, Berliner Philharmoniker and the members of the CHORWERK RUHR gave a stunning performance of Cummings. There was a formidable balance and blending between voices and instrumental groups. The phrases were beautifully shaped, accents ever sharp and harmonies coloured with utmost beauty.
After this uplifting adventure into the Boulez realm, a thrilling surge into the genius of Ravel was to follow. As is well known, between 1929 and 1930, Ravel worked simultaneously on two piano concertos. The Concerto in G, last heard in Berlin in the previous fall with Seong-Jin Cho and Sir Simon Rattle, is a playful mix of jazz, folk music and Mozartian beauty with delicious, dark undercurrents. In contrast, the Concerto for the Left Hand, written for Paul Wittgenstein, is a more sombre affair with its machine-like orchestral eruptions, cadenzas of scorching heat and huge dynamic contrasts. Yet, there are those achingly lyrical passages of lonely tenderness, and a great deal of instrumental humor and irony.
Originally commissioned by Wittgenstein, who, after losing his right arm in the Grear War, turned to various composers from Korngold to Prokofiev for new repertory. Notorious for his rather blunt take on composing, Wittgenstein felt that the Ravel concerto needed some revising and editing for its premiere. Ravel, of course, was not especially amused by this, and thus the relationship between the two artists took a less cordial turn.
Nowdays, it is hard to imagine someone trying to better the Ravel concerto. In its original guise, it stands out as one of the most perfect pieces among Ravel’s wonderful list of works.
For the Berlin concerts, Benjamin and the orchestra were joined by the fabulous French pianist Cédric Tiberghien. Together they formed a dream team for Ravel.
The concerto opens in the deep registers of the double basses, soon joined by sinister solo line by a double bassoon. The music climbs gradually upwards, as the other instrumets join, one by one, over a marvellously prolonged orchestral cresendo.
The soloist, silent all the way through the introduction, enters in a grand manner after the first orchestral climax. A cadenza-like passage, with a splendid illusion of two, if not three hands at play, ensues. Bar by bar, the music gains lyricism and brilliance, ever intertwined with darker textures.
The soloist and the orchestra finally join in a shatteringly beautiful song-like passage, only to be cut short by a quirky scherzo. The music travels through darker landscapes with occasional playful interludes, as if in some strange dream.
After this nocturnal journey, a radiant climax of white heat is unleashed. As the music cools down, an extended solo passage with aching beauty follows. The orchestra joins, and the final climax starts to build. But, in perfectly Ravelian manner, the climax is cut short by a grotesque burst of orchestral machinery, bringing the piece to its dark ending.
Within all the twists and turns, Tiberghien, Benjamin and the Berliner Philharmoniker were the perfect Ravelians, providing the Philharmonie audience with a spectacular journey into the Concerto for the Left Hand. Always quick to react upoun even the tiniest detail in the score, these marvellous musicians were living and breathing the music with perfect dedication.
Tiberghien’s take on the demanding solo part was full of wonderfully realized details and passages, embracing the wide musical and emtional range of the score with inspiring musicality. With Benjamin, the orchestra let Ravel’s colours, harmonies and textures shine out to the fullest. Rivetingly paced by Tiberghien and Benjamin, the enormously varied musical material was fused into one breathtaking continuum, resulting in a joyous response from the Philharmonie audience.
After the intermission, Ligeti’s stunning Clocks and Clouds for twelve voices and orchestra followed. During his time at San Francisco, Ligeti came in contact with the classic pieces of American 1960s minimalism, namely those of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. In the austere counterpoint of this new American generation, Ligeti found himself on a familiar ground. Though used in a far more complex manner by Ligeti, the idea of interlocking instrumental lines into shifting harmonic webs was also at the core of Reich and Riley.
In the early 1970s Ligeti embarked upon a quest of fusing these American discoveries with his quintessentially European idiom. This quest resulted in Clocks and Clouds, a ravishing mix of fluid, repetitive passages and harmonic clouds, enhanced by microintervals.
There is no text per se, but a carefully selected vocabulary of phonemes sung by the voices, ever blending with the instrumental sonorities. With sublime variations, Ligeti creates an ever-transforming sound-world of unique beauty. With these gradual transfornations the listener is lured into this stupendous sonic mist where time and space become one.
As ever with Ligeti, the score calls for utmost care in intonation, balance, dynamics and articulation. One could but marvel at the sheer virtuosity of the twelve singers of the CHORWERK RUHR and the members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, all performing on the very top of their game with Benjamin. A performance of a lifetime!
Concluding this most thrilling of programmes, Benjamin conducted his own Palimpsests for orchestra. Cast in two movements with shared material, the twenty-minute piece is, as the title suggests, a study of different musics layered on the top of each other, in order to form a fascinating interplay of textures.
In Palimpsests, there are stark contrasts, gentle fusions and a seemingly endless flow of surprises among the musical material. Fragments appear and disappear, transform and take ever different shapes, resulting in another breathtaking musical adventure.
Benjamin takes great care in choosing and developing his musical material within a brilliant sense of time and structure. His catalogue may not be vast in number, but most impressive in perfection, of which Palimpsests is a fabulous example.
Taking the full advantage of the glorious Berlin sound, Benjamin led a spellbinding performance of Palimpsests. The orchestra embraced the challenges of the score as given, providing an intense, yet sublimely transparent performance with wide emotional range and brilliant care for detail.
A fitting conclusion for one of the most inspiring concerts I’ve ever attended. Welcome to Berlin, Sir George Benjamin!
Berliner Philharmoniker
Sir George Benjamin, conductor
CHORWERK RUHR
Matilda Hofman, chorus director
Cédric Tiberghien, Piano
Pierre Boulez: Cummings ist der Dichter (1970/1986)
Maurice Ravel: Piano Concerto in D Major for the left hand (1929-30)
György Ligeti: Clocks and Clouds (1972-73)
Sir George Benjamin: Palimpsests (1998-2002)
Philharmonie, Berlin
Sunday 9 September, 8 pm
c Jari Kallio
AIM - Adventures in Music 
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