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This work features a montage of orchestral excerpts, plus a central aria for soprano, drawn from the third of four operas on which Martin Crimp and I have collaborated over the last couple of decades. Based on the life of Edward II, the narrative follows the King’s obsessive devotion to his lover Gaveston and his scandalous - and eventually fatal - neglect of both his wife Isabel and his country.

The seven movements, most of them brief, follow one another without break:

1. spacious and warm in tone, dominated by arching violin lines
2. low in tessitura and sullen in atmosphere, a sombre nocturne marked by antiphonal brass octaves and, at its conclusion, a pair of tolling gongs
3. a swift and energetic toccata
4. Isabel’s aria, from the opera’s second scene. The aria immediately follows the testimony of three witnesses who have been brought secretly into the palace to let Isabel know their grievances. They claim that while they have starved, Gaveston has expropriated their land and indulged in extravagant musical entertainments. They also allude to the King’s transgressive sexual conduct. In response, Isabel controls her anger, acknowledges their shared humanity, but then gives the witnesses a stark lesson in the difference between monetary and aesthetic value, dissolving in front of them a precious pearl, before throwing them out. She has, however, understood the warning, and realised that political stability will only be restored by Gaveston’s destruction  
5. a tumultuous tutti where, within a much more turbulent context, the brass octaves and gongs from the second movement return
6. a slow and stately chorale which eventually erupts into a sustained orchestral conflagration
7. a short, restless coda

Interludes and Aria is dedicated to Sir Simon Rattle on his 70^th birthday.

G.B. July 2024

Benjamin’s score combines the ravishing and the visceral in a way that only he can.

Evening Standard (Barry Millington) 13 January 2025 *****

Benjamin’s work was worthy of the occasion…Moody, dissonant, flamboyantly orchestrated and with a coiled tension that finally exploded like a volcano, it was thrillingly performed by the LSO, with Barbara Hannigan by turns taunting and tempestuous in the soprano solo.

The Times (Richard Morrison) 10 January 2025 *****

That opera’s rich orchestral interludes, vital to the drama, have been woven together, absorbing all anew into a many-layered instrumental texture, full of momentous brass outbursts, tolling gongs and clangorous cimbalom…Time for the Royal Opera to revisit it?

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks) 18 January 2025 ****

… a stage work in which the orchestral writing often seems to take charge of the drama…woven into a seamless, richly scored sequence…

The Guardian (Andrew Clements) 13 January 2025 ****

The result is reminiscent of Berg’s suite from Lulu, both for being drawn from an opera and in its potent sense of suppressed danger ready to snuff out any fleeting spark of true love…Away from the opera house, Benjamin’s music sounds just as concentrated as before, compelling and expressive at every turn.

Financial Times (Richard Fairman) 13 January 2025 ****

…the sensual extravagance of [Benjamin’s] operatic writing is a recent development…the Messiaen of St François’ stigmata comes out in the first of the six interludes, then the shadows in the cave under the cliffs of Debussy’s Pelléas in the second. Wave upon wave of Bergian, expressionist release crashed over the orchestra after the aria…Hannigan caressed a luscious melisma over the “slow radiance” of Martin Crimp’s text, and the controlled sensuality of the moment was worthy of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.

Bachtrack (Peter Quantrill) 10 January 2025 *****