Rat­ing: 3.5 stars out of 5

George Ben­jamin was the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony’s composer-in-residence this month for this year’s instal­la­tion of their Project San Fran­cisco. Truth­fully, I was not famil­iar with Benjamin’s work, but it came highly rec­om­mended by many of my col­leagues, and so I looked for­ward to hear­ing it. I attended the SFS’s final con­cert with Ben­jamin on Sat­ur­day night (16 Jan 2010), where he con­ducted two of his pieces: Ringed by the Flat Hori­zon (1980), the piece that brought him to inter­na­tional atten­tion, and a more recent piece, Duet (2008; see YouTube video below). In gen­eral, while I found Benjamin’s pieces highly com­pe­tent works, I don’t think he lives up to the (per­haps unfairly) high stan­dard peo­ple attribute to him. I also won­der if his music hasn’t suf­fered some­what from his early career suc­cesses, as there is a pal­pa­ble air of obsessive–compulsive dis­or­der in his approach to com­po­si­tion, which doesn’t seem to have changed much in the last 30 years, if the two pieces on the pro­gram are representative.

First, it’s worth not­ing Benjamin’s impres­sive pedi­gree, not only hav­ing stud­ied with Olivier Mes­saien as a teenager, but secur­ing both the hon­our of being his youngest ever stu­dent and the one he called his favourite. Accord­ing to critic Thomas May, Mes­si­aen felt Ben­jamin had some of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the young Mozart. He was also pro­pelled to com­poser star­dom (to the extent that exists) when, at 20, the BBC Proms per­formed his first large orches­tral work, Ringed by the Flat Hori­zon, in 1980. He was and still is the youngest liv­ing com­poser to be fea­tured on the Proms.

As a com­poser, Ben­jamin has been described as com­ing from a mod­ernist aes­thetic, but with softer edges and per­haps a greater sense of melod­i­cism or expres­siv­ity. It is for this lat­ter aspect that he has been most fre­quently lauded as one of the great com­posers of today.

He also has the lux­ury of not tak­ing on very many com­mis­sions, writ­ing a piece once every two or three years for the most part. He has stated in this regard that he likes to take a very long time to com­pose each piece so he can make sure every note and every detail is cor­rect. In regard to his Duet, he says, “…it took me months to get the gears in exactly the right place.… It’s extremely com­pli­cated, like the cogs in a watch: If one tiny aspect wasn’t in the right place, it wouldn’t work.”

This kind of metic­u­lous­ness raises a mild alarm for me. Not that there is any­thing wrong with being thorough—this is one of the things I pride myself most highly on in my own work—but com­po­si­tion is an extremely soli­tary task, as Ben­jamin admits, and when a piece of some 10 min­utes or so, like Duet, becomes the focus of sev­eral years’ work, there is a strong dan­ger of becom­ing myopi­cally obsessed with the incon­se­quen­tial minu­tiae at the expense of the music. This is a hold-over of the mod­ernist tra­di­tion; that we still feel jus­ti­fied in judg­ing a com­poser based on the rigour of his/her com­po­si­tional process. Yet we now know that Ian­nis Xenakis, for exam­ple, got a lot of his math wrong. But Xenakis’s pieces are still great, despite the fact that not only the minu­tiae but also many of the larger struc­tural processes don’t “fit”—in the end, Xenakis sac­ri­ficed rigour, whether con­sciously or not, to the music, and it is the music that we remem­ber him by.

Duet, fur­ther­more, takes on another clichéd obses­sion, this time the con­flict between the piano and orches­tra in a piano con­certo. This is why the piece is a duet, because Ben­jamin wants to bal­ance the two forces. I’ve never really under­stood why the piano is such a prob­lem to the orches­tra though. Nobody talks about the con­flict of the per­cus­sion sec­tion or the harp with the orches­tra, but these are instru­ments with sim­i­lar prob­lems to the piano in a fea­ture role. It’s a prob­lem of his­tor­i­cal prece­dent, not of acoustics. You can write a suc­cess­ful ensem­ble piano part for orches­tra, you just need to keep in mind the char­ac­ter­is­tics of both forces and use them as appropriate.

The issue seems to be more one of Ben­jamin con­fus­ing his tastes with acoustic real­ity. He decries a lot of the 19th-century piano con­certo reper­toire for what essen­tially boils down to a melo­dra­matic approach to the instru­ment. Fine, but it is an approach that works for a lot of peo­ple, it’s not a “prob­lem” of the piano ver­sus the orches­tra, but a suc­cess­ful take on the rela­tion­ship that he hap­pens to find distasteful.

In the end, Ben­jamin deals with the issue by remov­ing the vio­lins from the orches­tra, because they are “too legato to work with the piano” or some­thing to this effect (so much for the piano trio reper­toire). The result is a piano con­certo with a focus on the lower strings and winds. Ben­jamin does deal with these forces mas­ter­fully, and there are some great moments and colour com­bi­na­tions. But he fails to meet his goal of tran­scend­ing the piano con­certo form: the basic polyphony and per­cus­sive­ness of the piano is still con­trasted to the single-line sus­tain of the orches­tra. True, they don’t dou­ble each other’s har­monies, but the orches­tra serves as a colouris­tic accent to the piano quite often, and is that really so much different?

If any­thing, the piece feels straight-jacketed. Benjamin’s obses­sion with the cogs of the music leads to a pris­tine sur­face and undoubt­edly rig­or­ous struc­tural core, but the piece doesn’t have a strong sense of shape. The end­ing comes as an awk­ward sur­prise, sort of like, “Oh, it’s done now?” For Benjamin’s crit­i­cisms of Messiaen’s lim­ited con­trol over form, Messiaen’s Oiseaux exo­tiques that fol­lowed Duet on the pro­gram had a much more sat­is­fy­ing sense of musi­cal unfold­ing, end­ing with a long stretch of sta­tic chords that pro­vide a beau­ti­ful bal­ance to the chaos of the mul­ti­ple lay­ers of bird calls that make up the rest of the piece.

So with all the focus on Benjamin’s pedi­gree, if I were to offer him some com­po­si­tional advice at this point, it would be to loosen up and to write more pieces. He could take a hint from Rihm’s exper­i­ments with stream-of-consciousness, first-draft com­pos­ing to come up with greater spon­tane­ity and per­haps a more audi­ble sense of form. Unfor­tu­nately, Ben­jamin may have fallen vic­tim to his early suc­cesses by becom­ing overly obsessed with his process and sti­fling fur­ther growth. After all, the young Mozart did not reclu­sively retreat to a piece every few years, he wrote pro­lif­i­cally until his death. Ben­jamin, for all his poten­tial, would ben­e­fit from the same. As it stands, he writes com­pe­tent and mas­ter­ful works, but they aren’t mas­ter­pieces. One hun­dred years from now, the his­tory of late 20th-, early 21st-century music will cer­tainly remem­ber Rihm and Murail and cer­tain oth­ers of that gen­er­a­tion, but will they remem­ber Benjamin?