George Benjamin’s three-season tenure as LPO Composer-in-Residence continues on 11 February with a performance of Palimpsests at the Royal Festival Hall, alongside Ravel’s Mother Goose, Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy and Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Benjamin first conducted the LPO in 1987, presenting his Ringed by the Flat Horizon – the work that opened the ongoing residency in September 2025 with Edward Gardner. In 1993 he would also join them for the world premiere of Sudden Time.
Palimpsests is a 21-minute work cast in two parts. Its title describes the superimposition of layers of material, culminating in a striated structure of beguiling, fiendish complexity, as the simple song that opens the work becomes almost immediately imperceptible. “My aim”, Benjamin notes, “was to achieve something akin to dusk or dawn in the desert, or at high altitude in winter, when the sun is very low and the light almost horizontal, and crystal clear.”
It premiered with the London Symphony Orchestra and Pierre Boulez in 2002 as part of the LSO’s By George! Festival. It has since received over 50 performances internationally, with exponents including the Berlin Philharmonic, Concertgebouw, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, SWR Sinfonieorchester, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and Philharmonia. Benjamin recorded Palimpsests with Ensemble Modern in 2023, marking 30 years of collaboration with the ensemble, released on their own label; conductor and orchestra also created the world premiere recording of the work in 2004. In 2015 Benjamin recorded the piece with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, capturing a Musica viva concert.
From late March 2026 Benjamin will also be a composer-in-focus at the Tongyeong International Music Festival, entailing several national premieres. Ensemble Modern will present Into the Little Hill, his first stage work with Martin Crimp, on 28 March, with Fleur Barron and Jennifer France telling this gritty, political reimagining of the Pied Piper tale, conducted by Toby Thatcher; they also perform Benjamin’s Turner-inspired At First Light and Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra. On 5 April David Roberston concludes the focus with the South Korean debut of Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra, conducting the Tongyeong Festival Orchestra in the 17-minute work – a summation of the “energy, humour, and spirit” of its dedicatee Oliver Knussen.