From September 2025 George Benjamin will be LPO Composer-in-Residence for two seasons, showcasing his work as composer and conductor. His residency will be launched on 27 September with a performance of Benjamin’s Ringed by the Flat Horizon conducted by Edward Gardner at the Southbank Centre.
Benjamin’s first orchestral work, it premiered at the BBC Proms in 1980 when the composer was just 20 years old and has received over 200 performances internationally since, from conductors including Mark Elder, Susanna Mälkki, Kent Nagano, and Antonio Pappano. The 20-minute piece was inspired by lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and a dramatic photograph of a thunderstorm over the desert of New Mexico.
Gardner conducted Ringed by the Flat Horizon as part of his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in 2022; in 2023 he performed Benjamin’s Sudden Time with the LPO – a work the orchestra premiered in 1993 – at the Royal Festival Hall and on tour in Madrid and Zaragoza.
In February 2026 Benjamin will conduct the orchestra in Palimpsests, alongside Ravel’s Mother Goose, Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy and Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The 21-minute work, cast in two parts, 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.
“I now hugely look forward to collaborating with this illustrious orchestra and their wonderful Principal Conductor over the seasons ahead”, Benjamin noted at the announcement of the residency. He will also serve as mentor to the five participants selected each year for the LPO Young Composers programme, which aims to support the progression of talented orchestral composers.