TimBenjamin.com

Reviews

Antagony in The Times, April 1994

What does it take to be the Young Composer of the Year? TV producer Simon Broughton set out to discover who makes music and why.

Tim Benjamin is 18. He's tall, dark and wears a Siouxsie and the Banshees jacket and size 15 boots. Nothing unusual about that, except that Tim, a budding young composer, has written Antagony, a large-scale piece dramatising the situation and it has won the Lloyds Bank Young Composers Award. As a result, the piece was performed recently by the London Sinfonietta and appears on BBC television today.

Antagony made a big impact in the competition. As the composer Steve Martland, one of the judges, pointed out, it is very much a piece of the 1990s, unlike most of the other works in the competition.

The piece is contemporary in that the music is approachable and includes punchy writing for four saxophones and brass with a real rhythmic drive. The sheer spectacle and volume are compelling: the two wind bands often conflict with each other, there are some heavy blows on the percussion and a complex web of rumours on the log drums.

Simon Broughton (The Times, 4th April 1994)

The Guardian, September 2007

There's someone out there, listening to me. I know it. You don't believe me, but it's true.

Thus might a composer well address a concerned friend or parent.

On this occasion, however, the speaker was Michael Corley, a man whose surveillance conspiracy theory occupied several corners of Usenet in the early 1990s. Collecting a small community of correspondents, ranging from credulous and sympathetic to downright sarcastic, the paranoid Corley issued frequent postings about the personal insults allegedly levelled at him by newsreaders, radio presenters and random members of the public. Strangest of all, these ill-wishers seemed to Corley to be privy to the goings-on in his apartment. His television watched him back. His radio listened to him. But no one could find the bugs.

The true story of the unfortunate Corley has been made into an opera, or rather semi-opera, by the composer Tim Benjamin. Having retrieved acres of Corley correspondence from Google's Usenet archives, Benjamin and his librettist Sean Starke have crafted a dialogue in which Corley's rantings and the responses of his correspondents, identified on stage only by their clunky, early 90s-style email addresses (or in one case, as the sinister, disembodied, "email protected") form a well-defined dramatic arc. Corley sits centre stage, hidden behind a desk crammed with recording paraphernalia and his computer. His face is projected, close-up, on a giant screen, while the other characters sit aside, blinking under harsh lights.

Operas have always been about key societal myths. From Orfeo and the myth of the transcendence of the human condition through art, to La Traviata and the idea that patriarchal society is both undermined and redeemed through its "fallen" women, operas have provided culture with one of its clearest and most powerful mirrors, if also one of its most highly gilded. In the present case, the myth of universal surveillance and the slow crushing of individual autonomy by the security services is one of the most persistent, prominent and most necessarily examined of our age.

At worst, of course, the surveillance myth - as expressed, for instance, in our country's idiotic mistrust of identity cards - is simply a bathetic attempt to accord our actions and thoughts with a greater significance than they possess. On the flipside, however, society's collective paranoia can be read as a protest against a deeper, more real collapse of freedom through the atrophying of the collective imagination, the fracturing of community and the commodification of every last shade in our emotional spectrum. The idea of freedom has no meaning when the market for action has bottomed out.

Quite perfect, then, that a story about the profound, dehumanising suffering of a sad little man should be set to music. For there is no art better suited to portraying the fracturing of mankind's relation to its social environment than the astringent tones of post-tonal classical music. Its broken, cracked lyricism speaks more profoundly to contemporary humanity than any other artform. Or it would, if there were anyone listening.

Every year, opera houses spend millions of pounds redressing the great works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fine-tuning their musical mythologising to today's audiences. This is great work, work that's necessary to impose a little clarity on our hoarding, bag-lady culture.

But it would be good, too, if a little more of this money went on new works, using new music to address the myths we urgently need to confront today.

In the meantime, Corley's story is one that needs to be told, and it is told using music that needs to be listened to. The last performance is tonight. If you're in London, if you're listening, go.

Guy Dammann (The Guardian, 21st September 2007)

SPNM New Notes, May 2007

Radius are a new music group bringing together an enviable assortment of gifted young players. Following on from the ensemble's debut performance at the Wigmore Hall last week, this concert was brilliantly executed and conceived. Spearheaded by the composers Ian Vine and Tim Benjamin, who met whilst studying composition with Anthony Gilbert at the Royal Northern College of Music, Radius specialise in angular, serial, modernism played with commitment and intensity.

Vine's own underpaintings began the concert, its long decaying lines prompting some fine breath control from clarinettist Charys Green. Still more striking was the superbly individual performance of Benjamin's piano prelude by Berenika, whose thundering and taut playing threatened a virtuosic violence. Yet this was also a programme concerned with influence and lineage: the first half was completed by two rarely-performed works by Louis Andriessen and Anthony Gilbert. The latter's Moonfaring, which represents Australian tribal rites in a seven-movement work for cello and percussion, was particularly impressive. Adrian Spillett's sensitive marimba work combined with Oliver Coates' haunting phrases to create a performance that was both sonorous and plangent.

Another connection linking the various featured composers were their experiments with musical structures. Andriessen's piece for violin and piano follows the syllabic count of a Jan Engelman love poem, whilst John Cage's Five forgoes set instrumentation or rhythmic specificity for a series of held notes governed by mechanical time periods. Elliot Carter's Espirit Rude/Espirit Doux II for flute, clarinet and marimba takes its cue from the aspirated vowels of classical Greek. Throughout the programme, the performers coped well with the formal and logistical challenges such works present, none more so than Daniel Rowland in his heart-stopping interpretation of Berio's Sequenza VIII for solo violin.

Yet it was only in Benjamin's quirky series of bagatelles that the ensemble were finally united. Throughout this judicious musical künstlerroman, the players brought a welcome levity to the proceedings. On the evidence of these first concerts, all concerned certainly have something to smile about.

William May (New Notes, 2nd May 2007)

The Cherwell, Oxford, May 2006

Tim Benjamin: Prelude for solo piano, performed by Berenika
Tim Benjamin: String Quartet No. 2, performed by the Holywell String Quartet with Emily Eisen (soprano)

One of the problems with reviewing new music is that the critic's work is almost doubled, having to judge not only the quality of the performance but also the aesthetic qualities of the music itself. In the Holywell Music Room on Friday night, this job was considerably eased by the high quality of all the performances.

Tim Benjamin's Prelude for solo piano was performed by the pianist Berenika, who also commissioned the work. The prelude depicts the different temperaments of three travellers who meet on the road to a common destination. The part was negotiated confidently by Berenika despite the fiendishly difficult music, the clearly articulated themes of the different characters being a particular highlight in what was an appealingly approachable piece of contemporary music.

Benjamin's String Quartet No. 2 was a lengthier and less accessible work given by the ubiquitous Holywell quartet, containing a specific political programme inspired by repressive legislation introduced by the UK and US after terrorist attacks, supposedly to ensure the safety of their citizens. By the composer's own admission the programme is difficult to detect from the music alone, however I found that this did not distract from the work; heard as absolute music the quartet was still coherent.

The work was in two parts, the strings being joined in the second part by soprano Emily Eisen. The quartet opened with a slow chorale, melancholic and mournful, (perhaps the composer's requiem for his civil liberties?) before fragmenting into antiphonal pizzicato and spiccato, the different lines flying around the quartet with no hint at the difficulty of the passage portrayed by the performers. The second section of the substantial quartet saw the soprano singing the Latin text of John Locke's epitaph. Much contemporary music seems to revel in treacherously high vocal parts but Eisen navigated the part well, the slight fragility of her voice suiting the atmosphere of the piece.

All in all an enjoyable concert; contemporary music is overlooked in Oxford so this was a refreshing change, and a welcome introduction to Benjamin's music.

Nick Ireson (The Cherwell, 18th May 2006)

Radius in The Cherwell, May 2007

Walking into Britain's oldest concert hall, a swollen wadge of paper is thrust into my hand. Fat, burdensome programme notes are the norm for "experimental" or "modern" performances, and I wonder if Radius' chosen epithet "New" will mark them out as any different. Including a selection of works by 20th century masters, newly premiered works and pieces by slightly lesser known living composers, Radius neither attempt to associate themselves with trendy electronic fusion movements nor pander to the proles by sandwiching Mozart with Modern.

Anthony Gilbert's Moonfaring draws the audience into the tribal rites of spiritual evocation at one level removed; for this is the evocation of an evocation (bear with me) - a musical translation from Aboriginal to European classical instruments and ears. Cellist Oliver Coates emulates the dijeridoo with great precision, and his percussive, athletic bowing displays wonderful dexterity. Gilbert's aim to go beyond merely borrowing the musical expressions of another culture and to actually re-represent them in "western" terms is quite a challenge, but such issues are absorbed into what an overwhelming and sensuous experience.

Of the most recent compositions, Radius director Tim Benjamin's Five Bagatelles was most successful in embracing the "New". A challenge to memory, imagination and aural perception, we were lost in a piece which continually eluded expectation. Including BBC "Young Musician of the Year" winner, percussionist Adrian Spillet, Radius are the sum of a remarkable group of parts and demand to be listened to and engaged with as more than an accompaniment to the weighty programme notes.

Cara Bleiman (The Cherwell, Friday 4 May 2007)

Radius in The Oxford Student, May 2007

The Holywell Music Room, which boasts a rich cultural history that pre-dates even Haydn's famous visit to Oxford in the late eighteenth century, hosted a very impressive performance on Wednesday from recently formed professional new music group Radius (www.radiusmusic.org). The ensemble - brain-child of composer Tim Benjamin, of Christ Church - aims to perform canonical twentieth century works as well as those by living composers and benefits from a maintaining a close working relationship between the composers and internationally acclaimed performers that form the full-time line-up. But how does the modern audience, which for the most part is better acquainted with works written at the time of the Holywell's creation, react to a concert of music which "does not sound like Haydn", as Louis Andriessen describes his featured work Tuin van Eros?

We were immediately drawn into the performance by the exposed and sparse musical texture that begins Ian Vine's underpaintings, as the composer depicts the dauntingly bare canvass of an early stage in the sketching of a painting. Such textures, as were also found in John Cage's Five, among other of works presented, were delivered fluently and were never allowed to lose their mesmerising quality, or to stagnate. The programme, which was well structured and varied, saw these delicate moments juxtaposed with some explosively extrovert performances. Daniel Rowland's rendition of Berio's Sequenza VIII for solo violin stood out as notably impressive as did Berenika's reliably dramatic performance of Benjamin's Prelude I, for solo piano, of which she was the original commissioner.

The finale to this nigh-infallibly performed programme was Benjamin's Five Bagatelles which, along with underpaintings, enjoyed its world premire only five days earlier at London's celebrated Wigmore Hall, at which Radius performed the same programme for their debut concert. Benjamin weaves engagingly pithy poly-stylistic textures whose surface disruptions work in a very different way to the inharmonious discussions near the beginning of Prelude I. Juggling these multiple styles and short formal units, Benjamin does not allow even the openly comic incongruity of the hymn tune in the fourth movement to disturb the continuity of the work. Movements four and five have the feel of a double epilogue after the climax in the third, and play on the expectation of having a climax at the end of the piece (and concert). Perhaps this indicates that Benjamin does not feel that the bagatelle need always be a resoundingly light-hearted affair; perhaps there is a deeper analogy to be found?

Those who attended both nights of Radius' mini-tour felt as though Wednesday's performance matched the grandeur of the Wigmore Hall concert, Anthony Gilbert describing the performance of his Moonfaring here as "very imaginative" and among the best he had ever heard. He had particularly high praise for the undeniably impressive sound that cellist Oliver Coates conjures.

Among the audience there was a relatively large number of established composers, performers, and students of new music and I could not help but wonder about the extent to which contemporary "classical" music is restricted to "preaching to the converted". I hope that engagingly dramatic performances such as Radius offer will challenge the all-too-prevalent general attitude towards this repertoire as merely character-building rather than genuinely exciting. Look out for Radius at their next concert, at London's Royal Festival Hall in September.

Mark Gotham (The Oxford Student, May 2007)