George Benjamin in Conversation

Sir George Benjamin (*1960) began playing the piano at the age of seven and very soon started writing his own music as well. When he was only sixteen he was accepted at the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and piano with Messiaen’s wife Yvonne Loriod. His first orchestral piece was performed at the BBC Proms when he was twenty years of age. As a conductor he has given the premieres of numerous new works by composers such as Gÿorgy Ligeti, Gérard Grisey, Hans Abrahamsen, Unsuk Chin and Ondřej Adámek, and he has conducted some of the world’s finest orchestras: the Cleveland Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam or the Berlin Philharmonic, the latter of which engaged him as Composer-in-Residence for the 2018–2019 season. He has a particularly close affinity with Ensemble Modern, Prague Offspring’s Ensemble-in-Residence. He conducts the group regularly and has recorded many of his own works with them. The holder of the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, Benjamin has written instrumental compositions, choral works, songs, ballets and, above all, extremely successful operas. His second opera, Written on Skin from 2012, penned to a libretto by Martin Crimp, was even ranked by critics of The Guardian as the second greatest classical music work of the 21st century.