The orchestra had worked with George Benjamin only once before, on a much earlier work of his, A Mind of Winter, paired with his beloved Schumann Symphony No. 2. Especially when rehearsing his own music, there was a rare intensity that emanated from the conductor/composer, as though every sound we produced was under microscopic observation. Meanwhile, his remarkable debut stage work, the chamber opera Into the Little Hill, was only six years old by the time we met again. Composer and author, the British playwright Martin Crimp, had retold the tale of the Pied Piper, giving us a story about the dangerous potency of music. In so doing, they had understatedly but radically expanded the operatic craft with an eerie orchestration, vertiginous vocal writing, and a reimagined treatment of the narrative.
But still, the huge leap to a full-scale, full-score tale of angels and barbarity, composed "with the MCO in mind" (note the wording from a composer who is as fastidious with his words as he is with the next note of his score) caught us and everyone else unawares. Converging in Aix-en-Provence for rehearsals, impressions from our previous encounter had been weaved into the orchestral fabric, to the uncanny extent that individual or group personalities within the orchestra seemed almost reflected in the music, brought out at the right moment to drive forward the story taking place onstage. The intensity that we, the musicians, had felt from George before, reasserted itself, distilled and ratcheted up, an intensity that swept through the production as a whole, carrying us through to the celebrated premiere.
Now, almost a decade later and in a changed world, the MCO gathers in Cologne with anticipation running high. Once again, we have been entrusted with a brand new composition by George, only now with a much clearer sense of the magnitude of what to expect. Excitingly, this is to be his first purely orchestral piece in almost two decades. And we knew, too, from the dedication that there is a deep personal dimension to this music, in which the composer bids farewell to his great friend and Weggefährte Oliver Knussen.
Perhaps what intrigued us most was the title, Concerto for Orchestra. George explains to us that it was not at all clear at the outset what this new piece would become; there was, for example, no direct inspiration from a text or another art form. In fact, the work had been substantially re-written during the enforced year-long delay from its originally planned premiere in 2020, a period that the composer ruefully admits was conducive to the half-life of composing. So it was not his aim to compose his own concerto for orchestra - though he has long admired this particular form, especially those by Elliott Carter, Lutosławski, and Tippett. Instead, the virtuosity of the instrumental writing and the nature of the music that eventually formed the piece itself, led him to adopt this title.
The premiere is scheduled for the BBC Proms in August 2021, but George has requested that we find some time to meet before in order to acquaint ourselves with the score. We are more than eager to oblige, and arrive at the Kölner Philharmonie with fingers and lips thoroughly warmed-up from a midday livebroadcast with Daniel Harding in neighbouring Bonn. The score gives an indication of the mood – “Playful and Volatile” – but the organ-like opening chords in the winds are stern, with high strings joining them in jagged unison. The kinetic energy and forward propulsion that characterises the piece quickly establishes itself and at bar 29, we arrive at the first solo marked in the score, for tuba.