On Tour with George Benjamin:
Prom 33, Royal Albert Hall, August 31, 2021
Timothy Summers
with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at BBC Studios, Maida Vale, London; August 28, 3PM
This first afternoon in London we are rehearsing ‘The Way to Castle Yonder’ by Oliver Knussen, with George Benjamin conducting. There are probably few English composers from the late 20th or early 21st century who did not encounter Oliver Knussen, directly or indirectly. He loomed warmly over generations of musicians. I even worked with him myself, at the Tanglewood Music center in Lenox, MA during the early 90s, where he was one of the three conductors required for Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen. Though Knussen worked internationally, he figured most majestically in his role at Snape Maltings, as heir to the musical heritage of Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh. To say that he ‘loomed’ is no exaggeration. He was bearded and heavyset, and he must have been at least 6’5”. In any storybook, he'd be the giant, no questions asked. George Benjamin’s ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ is dedicated both to the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and to his memory. We are preparing for its premiere at the Proms on Monday, August 31.
We met George Benjamin in 2012 at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, where we also gave the premiere of his opera, ‘Written on Skin’. I ran into him just before the first reading of the piece. He was wearing a sweater, nervously, even though it was ninety degrees outside. He said to my wife Annette, who remarked on his warm clothing, that he was wearing the sweater because he didn’t want to catch a cold before the premiere. There was something characteristic about it: something lightly comic but also unapologetically controlling or obsessive -- above all, something which indicated an intense focus and purpose. At that time, we had no idea.
The opera, it turned out, was indeed worth staying healthy for, even if you weren’t the composer, conductor, or both. When we finished the first reading, there was a bright silence in the room. Barbara Hannigan and Bejun Mehta stood astonished, glowing, and spent. Chris Purves, ‘the Protector’, was memorably wide-eyed. It was a work as full of drama in its silences and unisons as it was in its strangeness and violence. Its force was clear.
George Benjamin seems at first, or from a distance, almost cherubic, but this impression burns quickly away, even in casual situations. For example: at a certain point during a rehearsal in Aix, as the orchestra crashed through some fidgety figure, he stopped and stated, almost apologetically, “Ladies and Gentlemen, you must forgive me for being furious.” It was a sort of witticism, certainly, but it would not have been memorable if it had not had something of a real edge to it. And at that point it became clear that a) all would be well and b) he stood behind what he said and wrote.
London in 2021 is not quite its usual self. The streets’ activities are bustling, but not bright. There is a sense in the air of something beyond telling — of something fundamentally unsettled, as though some ancient dust or ash had shaken loose and settled thinly on everything. Some energy has been lost, removed or hidden. In the neighborhoods of row houses, on a Saturday morning of bright blue skies, hardly a soul is to be seen. Occasionally someone wanders expensively by with a coffee and bag of pastries. But the children, especially, are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they are on holiday. The houses are white. The Aston-Martins are usually grey. The sky is blue with an ambiguous hint of metal. The side-roads from Kensington to Notting Hill are residential, but it is not clear who, if anyone, has taken up residence. Perhaps this is a result of foreign investment in real estate. But that cannot be all. Brexit and Covid, two harsh neologisms, hang in the air like escaped graffiti.
Upon waking the first day, each member of the orchestra is obligated to take two Covid tests. The first is a ‘lateral slide’ test, required for entry to the BBC studio. (The ‘lateral slide’ test is actually just a quick-test, but, for English purposes, it has been gracefully renamed. It must be said that this evocative new pair of words does little to lift the fundamental gloom of the procedure.) The second test is a PCR test, the ‘day 2 test’, required of foreign travelers by the UK government. It becomes hard to see images of George, patron saint of England, pushing a big stick up a dragon’s nose without thinking that St. George must have been giving that dragon a PCR test. Special mailboxes for gathering these biohazardous materials have been set up in a few places across town. Our most convenient drop-box stood in a nearby alley behind a drab hotel.
When you register the PCR test online, the final check-box will ask you if you would like to receive promotional materials from the Randox corporation.
This first afternoon in London we are rehearsing ‘The Way to Castle Yonder’ by Oliver Knussen, with George Benjamin conducting. There are probably few English composers from the late 20th or early 21st century who did not encounter Oliver Knussen, directly or indirectly. He loomed warmly over generations of musicians. I even worked with him myself, at the Tanglewood Music center in Lenox, MA during the early 90s, where he was one of the three conductors required for Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen. Though Knussen worked internationally, he figured most majestically in his role at Snape Maltings, as heir to the musical heritage of Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh. To say that he ‘loomed’ is no exaggeration. He was bearded and heavyset, and he must have been at least 6’5”. In any storybook, he'd be the giant, no questions asked. George Benjamin’s ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ is dedicated both to the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and to his memory. We are preparing for its premiere at the Proms on Monday, August 31.
We met George Benjamin in 2012 at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, where we also gave the premiere of his opera, ‘Written on Skin’. I ran into him just before the first reading of the piece. He was wearing a sweater, nervously, even though it was ninety degrees outside. He said to my wife Annette, who remarked on his warm clothing, that he was wearing the sweater because he didn’t want to catch a cold before the premiere. There was something characteristic about it: something lightly comic but also unapologetically controlling or obsessive -- above all, something which indicated an intense focus and purpose. At that time, we had no idea.
The opera, it turned out, was indeed worth staying healthy for, even if you weren’t the composer, conductor, or both. When we finished the first reading, there was a bright silence in the room. Barbara Hannigan and Bejun Mehta stood astonished, glowing, and spent. Chris Purves, ‘the Protector’, was memorably wide-eyed. It was a work as full of drama in its silences and unisons as it was in its strangeness and violence. Its force was clear.
George Benjamin seems at first, or from a distance, almost cherubic, but this impression burns quickly away, even in casual situations. For example: at a certain point during a rehearsal in Aix, as the orchestra crashed through some fidgety figure, he stopped and stated, almost apologetically, “Ladies and Gentlemen, you must forgive me for being furious.” It was a sort of witticism, certainly, but it would not have been memorable if it had not had something of a real edge to it. And at that point it became clear that a) all would be well and b) he stood behind what he said and wrote.
London in 2021 is not quite its usual self. The streets’ activities are bustling, but not bright. There is a sense in the air of something beyond telling — of something fundamentally unsettled, as though some ancient dust or ash had shaken loose and settled thinly on everything. Some energy has been lost, removed or hidden. In the neighborhoods of row houses, on a Saturday morning of bright blue skies, hardly a soul is to be seen. Occasionally someone wanders expensively by with a coffee and bag of pastries. But the children, especially, are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they are on holiday. The houses are white. The Aston-Martins are usually grey. The sky is blue with an ambiguous hint of metal. The side-roads from Kensington to Notting Hill are residential, but it is not clear who, if anyone, has taken up residence. Perhaps this is a result of foreign investment in real estate. But that cannot be all. Brexit and Covid, two harsh neologisms, hang in the air like escaped graffiti.
Upon waking the first day, each member of the orchestra is obligated to take two Covid tests. The first is a ‘lateral slide’ test, required for entry to the BBC studio. (The ‘lateral slide’ test is actually just a quick-test, but, for English purposes, it has been gracefully renamed. It must be said that this evocative new pair of words does little to lift the fundamental gloom of the procedure.) The second test is a PCR test, the ‘day 2 test’, required of foreign travelers by the UK government. It becomes hard to see images of George, patron saint of England, pushing a big stick up a dragon’s nose without thinking that St. George must have been giving that dragon a PCR test. Special mailboxes for gathering these biohazardous materials have been set up in a few places across town. Our most convenient drop-box stood in a nearby alley behind a drab hotel.
When you register the PCR test online, the final check-box will ask you if you would like to receive promotional materials from the Randox corporation.
In Dortmund and London in 2016, the orchestra assembled a large collection of George’s works to present alongside an unstaged version of ‘Written on Skin’. We also played a chamber opera called ‘Into the Little Hill’, which set the musical story of the pied piper of Hamelin to music. This was during the time of the American Presidential election, when the madness of charismatic disinformation was starting to reveal its true depths. The piece has no politics, but I have never played a more chillingly political work; it is enough to say that the children of Hamelin are not on holiday by the end. The performance of ‘Written on Skin’ at the Barbican, at the end of our tour, was memorably extraordinary, coming across more intensely focused even than the fully staged version. The text-coloring (a kind of ‘illumination’ which filtered through the work) created its own light, and the work's completeness — a ‘nothing that is’, made evident — was clearer for the lack of visual reference.
Back at the BBC Studio in Maida Vale: the last work of our day is to revisit the ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, which we read a few months before in Cologne. Much is recognisable in a broad sort of way from 'Written on Skin', but its trajectory and purpose is clearly its own. We will also play a smaller new work of his, ‘Three Consorts for Chamber Orchestra’, which is a re-orchestration of original works by Henry Purcell. On the title page of these works is written "c. 1680, transcribed 2021". There are a few clues in the Purcell arrangements to how Benjamin’s music structures its sounds. Perhaps the clearest idea comes from the structure of the ‘Fantazia Upon One Note’, because it happens so often in Benjamin's music that the richness of a single note or sound — of its physical-harmonic contact with the world and with other objects — can become a powerful and lasting musical idea. Any note can become violently unstable, as though envious of the space around it, and can generate contrasting or conflicting stories around itself without end or mercy.
A sense of loss is everywhere in London. The river flows on, though, and the bridges still stand. The ‘Shard’ seems less interesting; the neighborhoods and histories, more. One might be reminded of the strangeness of the word ‘lively’, and how it is almost an adverb. It points toward something ‘life-like’ — something which can serve as an effective, convincing symbol for the act of living. London has lost some of its liveliness, some of its ability to create what seems like life.
Ives Street, Chelsea, London; August 29, 7PM
To shake off the travel and the hours in the studio, it can be a good thing to take a long walk. There is a lot to see in London, if you’ve the time to take a roundabout way back to Kensington from Maida Vale: Little Venice, Marylebone, Soho, Mayfair, Belgravia, Chelsea. I’ve parked myself at a place in Chelsea whose name is a number, or numerical expression, across from a club whose name is two consonants. The restaurant sits across from what used to belong to Harrod’s, as the cartoonish lettering carved in the stone at the top indicates (“Harrods Stores, Limited, 1911”). But those letters no longer apply. They’re an ornament, a footnote. They are history. We live — and I am having a cheeseburger — in the future, which has darkened windows and speaks in code. A young woman walks by in spandex and a fur vest.
London offers a dream of consequence. Money, trade, power, status, the ‘foreign office’…. the memorial gates, which stand near Buckingham palace, state place-names plainly: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Caribbean, Africa. A memorial not only for the fallen, but for Britain, out in the world, as an actor. It is a memorial to people, places and things which have fallen, as things do, over time.
Meanwhile, the concert is shaping up. George Benjamin composes with great care, force and specificity, and conducts the same way. This is not always a benefit in the conducting. Things can slow down when the conducting becomes excessively investigative or proprietary. It seems he sometimes (understandably) slips out of the time domain into the frequency domain.
But this is a digression: the Purcell arrangements should be very beautiful in the Albert Hall: expressive, resonant and peculiarly deep even though they are brief works. Their history also resonates. Knussen's work will gallop through its quick fantastical expanse. The Ravel Piano Concerto (with soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard) will show itself for the astonishing harmonic-melodic artifact that it is. (I would have the second movement at my funeral, if it were to be on offer.) George’s piece is beginning to find its nodes of greatest tension and its passages of greatest release. We will work on it more to shape and refine it, and it will take on still more shape as the tour continues to Berlin and Hamburg.
It begins to grow dark; time to find the hotel.
Hyde Park, London; August 30, 10:30 AM
London is still a city of stories, tangled, braided, coded and layered. The city has a geography, and the language has a geography. Walking around, it’s hard to know if you’re navigating the place or the story it makes you tell yourself. ‘Mind your head’ says a great deal more here than it has any right to. Even the lakes of Hyde Park form a jumbled semicolon, made from the "long water", and "round pond". And at its Eastern end, the "long water" turns into the "serpentine", with a slippery tongue of water coming out the end.
Today is concert day, Prom 33, at the Royal Albert Hall, which sits roundly across from the Prince Albert Memorial. (That can seem like rather a lot of Albert, but the memory of Victoria, having named the age and everything that came with it, far outpaces any memorials for the Prince Consort.) Albert Hall is enormous, holding almost six thousand people. Normally the backstage of a concert hall has photographs of noted performers, known to musicians. Here it is Muhammad Ali, the Beatles, sumo wrestlers, and the Ford Motor Company. It is a kind of colosseum.
All members of the orchestra have slid past the second ‘lateral slide’ test (thank God), and we can shuffle into the hall for our own place in the concert series. Rehearsal begins at 2:30. The concert will be at 7:30.
Back at the BBC Studio in Maida Vale: the last work of our day is to revisit the ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, which we read a few months before in Cologne. Much is recognisable in a broad sort of way from 'Written on Skin', but its trajectory and purpose is clearly its own. We will also play a smaller new work of his, ‘Three Consorts for Chamber Orchestra’, which is a re-orchestration of original works by Henry Purcell. On the title page of these works is written "c. 1680, transcribed 2021". There are a few clues in the Purcell arrangements to how Benjamin’s music structures its sounds. Perhaps the clearest idea comes from the structure of the ‘Fantazia Upon One Note’, because it happens so often in Benjamin's music that the richness of a single note or sound — of its physical-harmonic contact with the world and with other objects — can become a powerful and lasting musical idea. Any note can become violently unstable, as though envious of the space around it, and can generate contrasting or conflicting stories around itself without end or mercy.
A sense of loss is everywhere in London. The river flows on, though, and the bridges still stand. The ‘Shard’ seems less interesting; the neighborhoods and histories, more. One might be reminded of the strangeness of the word ‘lively’, and how it is almost an adverb. It points toward something ‘life-like’ — something which can serve as an effective, convincing symbol for the act of living. London has lost some of its liveliness, some of its ability to create what seems like life.
Ives Street, Chelsea, London; August 29, 7PM
To shake off the travel and the hours in the studio, it can be a good thing to take a long walk. There is a lot to see in London, if you’ve the time to take a roundabout way back to Kensington from Maida Vale: Little Venice, Marylebone, Soho, Mayfair, Belgravia, Chelsea. I’ve parked myself at a place in Chelsea whose name is a number, or numerical expression, across from a club whose name is two consonants. The restaurant sits across from what used to belong to Harrod’s, as the cartoonish lettering carved in the stone at the top indicates (“Harrods Stores, Limited, 1911”). But those letters no longer apply. They’re an ornament, a footnote. They are history. We live — and I am having a cheeseburger — in the future, which has darkened windows and speaks in code. A young woman walks by in spandex and a fur vest.
London offers a dream of consequence. Money, trade, power, status, the ‘foreign office’…. the memorial gates, which stand near Buckingham palace, state place-names plainly: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Caribbean, Africa. A memorial not only for the fallen, but for Britain, out in the world, as an actor. It is a memorial to people, places and things which have fallen, as things do, over time.
Meanwhile, the concert is shaping up. George Benjamin composes with great care, force and specificity, and conducts the same way. This is not always a benefit in the conducting. Things can slow down when the conducting becomes excessively investigative or proprietary. It seems he sometimes (understandably) slips out of the time domain into the frequency domain.
But this is a digression: the Purcell arrangements should be very beautiful in the Albert Hall: expressive, resonant and peculiarly deep even though they are brief works. Their history also resonates. Knussen's work will gallop through its quick fantastical expanse. The Ravel Piano Concerto (with soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard) will show itself for the astonishing harmonic-melodic artifact that it is. (I would have the second movement at my funeral, if it were to be on offer.) George’s piece is beginning to find its nodes of greatest tension and its passages of greatest release. We will work on it more to shape and refine it, and it will take on still more shape as the tour continues to Berlin and Hamburg.
It begins to grow dark; time to find the hotel.
Hyde Park, London; August 30, 10:30 AM
London is still a city of stories, tangled, braided, coded and layered. The city has a geography, and the language has a geography. Walking around, it’s hard to know if you’re navigating the place or the story it makes you tell yourself. ‘Mind your head’ says a great deal more here than it has any right to. Even the lakes of Hyde Park form a jumbled semicolon, made from the "long water", and "round pond". And at its Eastern end, the "long water" turns into the "serpentine", with a slippery tongue of water coming out the end.
Today is concert day, Prom 33, at the Royal Albert Hall, which sits roundly across from the Prince Albert Memorial. (That can seem like rather a lot of Albert, but the memory of Victoria, having named the age and everything that came with it, far outpaces any memorials for the Prince Consort.) Albert Hall is enormous, holding almost six thousand people. Normally the backstage of a concert hall has photographs of noted performers, known to musicians. Here it is Muhammad Ali, the Beatles, sumo wrestlers, and the Ford Motor Company. It is a kind of colosseum.
All members of the orchestra have slid past the second ‘lateral slide’ test (thank God), and we can shuffle into the hall for our own place in the concert series. Rehearsal begins at 2:30. The concert will be at 7:30.
Holland Park, London; August 31, 10:55 AM
On the day after our turn at the Proms, it is back to the stories, secrets, gardens, passageways and pigeons of London. When the concert was over, we loitered at the Gloucester Arms, a pub down the hill by Imperial College. There was ale, chips and the burbled noise of our little crowd in the street; Paco's 50th birthday rang into the night. This morning, still a bit darkened by the ale, there is a chance to visit nearby Holland Park on an almost-rainy morning, before we fly to Berlin. Richly equipped children play football, preparing, it appears, for a life in the sport of finance: elbowing for advantage, practicing the quick first step. They are seven or eight years old, and they seem to have hired an Italian trainer. One child plays much more fluidly than the others, literally running circles around them.
On the day after our turn at the Proms, it is back to the stories, secrets, gardens, passageways and pigeons of London. When the concert was over, we loitered at the Gloucester Arms, a pub down the hill by Imperial College. There was ale, chips and the burbled noise of our little crowd in the street; Paco's 50th birthday rang into the night. This morning, still a bit darkened by the ale, there is a chance to visit nearby Holland Park on an almost-rainy morning, before we fly to Berlin. Richly equipped children play football, preparing, it appears, for a life in the sport of finance: elbowing for advantage, practicing the quick first step. They are seven or eight years old, and they seem to have hired an Italian trainer. One child plays much more fluidly than the others, literally running circles around them.
Albert Hall is at least as much a monument to the Industrial age as to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the Prince Consort. Its scale is beyond what seems reasonable for a concert, though the sound is surprisingly clear. The crowds, cowed by Covid, are not coming in the usual numbers, but they are still substantial enough to be festive. The ‘prommers’, wielding pints, perform their ritual ‘heave, ho’ at the lifting of the piano lid, and encores are brought forth by their atavistic stomping. It is an unusual environment for any concert, let alone a concert of highly technical new music based in classical tradition. There is a full showing of the composition community of London. This, too, is part of the story, which reaches back to Knussen, Benjamin Britten, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and even further back to Henry Purcell, who features on our own program, though he lived in the time of Charles II and Queen Mary. George Benjamin is the Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King’s College, London.
Despite everything there is to see and do, our tour, like the city of London and the world, remains haunted by the coronavirus and its disruptions. The virus itself lurks unseen, as numbers rise and fall, partly guided by behaviors, and partly guided by the faceless winds of probability. The restrictions, all of which must have seemed like a good idea at the time, leave a hellish trail of bureaucracy: death by a thousand paper cuts for a traveling band. We have all remained healthy, though some members of the orchestra did have to be replaced at the last minute, caught in tangled nets of requirement. (Most notably: Spanish members who had received two different vaccines were not allowed into the UK, due to the color-coding of countries.) The cultural shudder is to be felt everywhere, as storylines shift worldwide. And the illness cannot be fought with sweaters.
There was, in the end, a beautiful concert, full of sounds new and old, speaking with each other, remembering each other, predicting each other, supporting each other's themes. It had been made possible for us through great efforts on the part of many who did not appear onstage or in music history.
First there was the work of Oliver Knussen: colorful, fantastic, silly, bombastic, and a bit sad when it was meant to be so. Then Purcell, rearranged in space and time, mined both for its counterpoint and for its spectra. Then Ravel, the composer’s composer who is also the audience’s composer. Pierre-Laurent Aimard pursues and investigates, chasing the interiors of the notation, folding chords and melodies with a knowing disrespect for the order of time.
And last, George Benjamin's Concerto for Orchestra; a piece written for our orchestra and for the memory of a dear colleague. It is compact, fluent and visceral. At the beginning there is a tear in harmonic fabric, shrill in the winds, strangely archaic and harshly present. Hints of rage, fights over what’s to come. Sweet moments draped in threat; threatening moments which deliver on their promise. In the end there is no resolution, only faraway pirouettes on a muted violin, punctuated by a dark force in the violins opposite, powerful and rough. The music plays on, as best it can, until, finally, it doesn’t.
***
Despite everything there is to see and do, our tour, like the city of London and the world, remains haunted by the coronavirus and its disruptions. The virus itself lurks unseen, as numbers rise and fall, partly guided by behaviors, and partly guided by the faceless winds of probability. The restrictions, all of which must have seemed like a good idea at the time, leave a hellish trail of bureaucracy: death by a thousand paper cuts for a traveling band. We have all remained healthy, though some members of the orchestra did have to be replaced at the last minute, caught in tangled nets of requirement. (Most notably: Spanish members who had received two different vaccines were not allowed into the UK, due to the color-coding of countries.) The cultural shudder is to be felt everywhere, as storylines shift worldwide. And the illness cannot be fought with sweaters.
There was, in the end, a beautiful concert, full of sounds new and old, speaking with each other, remembering each other, predicting each other, supporting each other's themes. It had been made possible for us through great efforts on the part of many who did not appear onstage or in music history.
First there was the work of Oliver Knussen: colorful, fantastic, silly, bombastic, and a bit sad when it was meant to be so. Then Purcell, rearranged in space and time, mined both for its counterpoint and for its spectra. Then Ravel, the composer’s composer who is also the audience’s composer. Pierre-Laurent Aimard pursues and investigates, chasing the interiors of the notation, folding chords and melodies with a knowing disrespect for the order of time.
And last, George Benjamin's Concerto for Orchestra; a piece written for our orchestra and for the memory of a dear colleague. It is compact, fluent and visceral. At the beginning there is a tear in harmonic fabric, shrill in the winds, strangely archaic and harshly present. Hints of rage, fights over what’s to come. Sweet moments draped in threat; threatening moments which deliver on their promise. In the end there is no resolution, only faraway pirouettes on a muted violin, punctuated by a dark force in the violins opposite, powerful and rough. The music plays on, as best it can, until, finally, it doesn’t.
***
Photo Credit: Jennifer Taylor
Benjamin Hochman is a musician of exceptional versatility who regularly appears in multiple guises as orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. In recent years he has ventured into the orchestral repertoire as a conductor. His wide range of partners and projects is matched by his curiosity, focus, and ability to communicate deeply with audiences.
Since his Carnegie Hall debut as soloist with the Israel Philharmonic under the baton of Pinchas Zukerman, Hochman has enjoyed an international performing career, appearing as soloist with the New York, Los Angeles, and Prague Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestras under conductors including Gianandrea Noseda, Trevor Pinnock, John Storgårds, and Joshua Weilerstein.
A winner of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant, he performs at venues including Konzerthaus Wien, Berlin Konzerthaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Louvre in Paris, Liszt Academy in Budapest, Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, New York’s 92nd Street Y, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Festival highlights include IMS Prussia Cove, Israel Festival, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Lucerne, Santa Fe, Spoleto, and Verbier.
Hochman’s projects in 2021 reflect both his imaginative approach to programming and his ongoing relationships with several orchestras and festivals. He will perform Canonic Codes, a piano recital juxtaposing musical canons by Bach, George Benjamin, and Christopher Trapani (a premiere) for the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, where he is a regular guest. He will play and direct Mozart’s Piano Concertos K. 414 and K. 449 for the season-opening concert at Music Mountain, with musicians from the Roosevelt Island Orchestra, an orchestra he founded in 2015. He returns to Santa Fe Pro Musica to open their 2021-22 season, conducting Beethoven Symphony No. 5 and playing Mozart Concerto for Two Pianos with Anne-Marie McDermott. He rejoins the Orlando Philharmonic and Eric Jacobsen to perform one of his favorite concertos, the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1.
Chamber music collaborations in 2021 include Berlin performances with Noah Bendix-Balgley, Viviane Hagner and Amihai Grosz at Framed Berlin. Concerts in the US include a recital with Susie Park for The Schubert Club in Minnesota, with principal players of several major American orchestras at Strings Music Festival in Colorado, and with Melissa Reardon and Raman Ramakrishnan at the Bard College Conservatory of Music in New York. He will make his first chamber music recording for Aparté Records in Paris with violist Dov Scheindlin of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in a program of the two Brahms Sonatas for Viola and Piano Op. 120 alongside works by Robert and Clara Schumann.
Hochman began conducting in 2015 as a result of his longstanding admiration for the orchestral repertoire and his collaborative approach to music making. A graduate of The Juilliard School’s conducting program, where he received the Bruno Walter Scholarship, Hochman trained under Alan Gilbert from 2016-2018. He served as musical assistant to Louis Langrée, Paavo Järvi, and Thierry Fischer at the Mostly Mozart festival in 2016. In 2018 he participated in the Tanglewood Conducting Seminar, where he worked with Stefan Asbury, and he has also participated in masterclasses with Fabio Luisi and David Zinman. In recent years he has conducted the English Chamber Orchestra, the Orlando Philharmonic, The Orchestra Now at Bard Music Festival, the Florida Orchestra, and the Juilliard Orchestra.
Hochman’s discography reflects his wide-ranging musical interests as well as his personal path. In 2019, he recorded Mozart Piano Concertos No. 17 and No. 24, playing and directing the English Chamber Orchestra. It was released on Avie Records and received critical acclaim from Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, among others. Hochman’s first two recordings for Avie Records were Homage to Schubert (works by Schubert, Kurtag, and Widmann) and Variations (works by Knussen, Berio, Lieberson, Benjamin, and Brahms). Variations was selected by the New York Times as one of the best recordings of 2015 and was also praised by The New Yorker.
Chamber music has been a vital part of Hochman’s life, from his early years in Israel, to his formative years at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and as a member of The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His chamber music partners have included the Tokyo, Casals, and Jerusalem quartets, Jonathan Biss, Lisa Batishvili, Jaime Laredo, Miklós Perényi, and David Soyer.
Hochman is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, among them the Partosh Prize awarded by the Israeli Minister of Culture, the Outstanding Pianist citation at the Verbier Academy, and the Festorazzi Award from the Curtis Institute of Music.
Born in Jerusalem in 1980, Hochman began his piano studies with Esther Narkiss at the Conservatory of the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and continued his private studies with Emanuel Krasovsky in Tel Aviv. He is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied from 1997-2001 with Claude Frank, and the Mannes College of Music, where he studied from 2001-2003 with Richard Goode. His studies were supported by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. He serves on the piano faculty of Bard College Conservatory of Music and is currently a Research Associate at Bard College Berlin. He is a Steinway Artist.
www.benjaminhochman.com
Since his Carnegie Hall debut as soloist with the Israel Philharmonic under the baton of Pinchas Zukerman, Hochman has enjoyed an international performing career, appearing as soloist with the New York, Los Angeles, and Prague Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestras under conductors including Gianandrea Noseda, Trevor Pinnock, John Storgårds, and Joshua Weilerstein.
A winner of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant, he performs at venues including Konzerthaus Wien, Berlin Konzerthaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Louvre in Paris, Liszt Academy in Budapest, Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, New York’s 92nd Street Y, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Festival highlights include IMS Prussia Cove, Israel Festival, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Lucerne, Santa Fe, Spoleto, and Verbier.
Hochman’s projects in 2021 reflect both his imaginative approach to programming and his ongoing relationships with several orchestras and festivals. He will perform Canonic Codes, a piano recital juxtaposing musical canons by Bach, George Benjamin, and Christopher Trapani (a premiere) for the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, where he is a regular guest. He will play and direct Mozart’s Piano Concertos K. 414 and K. 449 for the season-opening concert at Music Mountain, with musicians from the Roosevelt Island Orchestra, an orchestra he founded in 2015. He returns to Santa Fe Pro Musica to open their 2021-22 season, conducting Beethoven Symphony No. 5 and playing Mozart Concerto for Two Pianos with Anne-Marie McDermott. He rejoins the Orlando Philharmonic and Eric Jacobsen to perform one of his favorite concertos, the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1.
Chamber music collaborations in 2021 include Berlin performances with Noah Bendix-Balgley, Viviane Hagner and Amihai Grosz at Framed Berlin. Concerts in the US include a recital with Susie Park for The Schubert Club in Minnesota, with principal players of several major American orchestras at Strings Music Festival in Colorado, and with Melissa Reardon and Raman Ramakrishnan at the Bard College Conservatory of Music in New York. He will make his first chamber music recording for Aparté Records in Paris with violist Dov Scheindlin of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in a program of the two Brahms Sonatas for Viola and Piano Op. 120 alongside works by Robert and Clara Schumann.
Hochman began conducting in 2015 as a result of his longstanding admiration for the orchestral repertoire and his collaborative approach to music making. A graduate of The Juilliard School’s conducting program, where he received the Bruno Walter Scholarship, Hochman trained under Alan Gilbert from 2016-2018. He served as musical assistant to Louis Langrée, Paavo Järvi, and Thierry Fischer at the Mostly Mozart festival in 2016. In 2018 he participated in the Tanglewood Conducting Seminar, where he worked with Stefan Asbury, and he has also participated in masterclasses with Fabio Luisi and David Zinman. In recent years he has conducted the English Chamber Orchestra, the Orlando Philharmonic, The Orchestra Now at Bard Music Festival, the Florida Orchestra, and the Juilliard Orchestra.
Hochman’s discography reflects his wide-ranging musical interests as well as his personal path. In 2019, he recorded Mozart Piano Concertos No. 17 and No. 24, playing and directing the English Chamber Orchestra. It was released on Avie Records and received critical acclaim from Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, among others. Hochman’s first two recordings for Avie Records were Homage to Schubert (works by Schubert, Kurtag, and Widmann) and Variations (works by Knussen, Berio, Lieberson, Benjamin, and Brahms). Variations was selected by the New York Times as one of the best recordings of 2015 and was also praised by The New Yorker.
Chamber music has been a vital part of Hochman’s life, from his early years in Israel, to his formative years at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and as a member of The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His chamber music partners have included the Tokyo, Casals, and Jerusalem quartets, Jonathan Biss, Lisa Batishvili, Jaime Laredo, Miklós Perényi, and David Soyer.
Hochman is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, among them the Partosh Prize awarded by the Israeli Minister of Culture, the Outstanding Pianist citation at the Verbier Academy, and the Festorazzi Award from the Curtis Institute of Music.
Born in Jerusalem in 1980, Hochman began his piano studies with Esther Narkiss at the Conservatory of the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and continued his private studies with Emanuel Krasovsky in Tel Aviv. He is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied from 1997-2001 with Claude Frank, and the Mannes College of Music, where he studied from 2001-2003 with Richard Goode. His studies were supported by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. He serves on the piano faculty of Bard College Conservatory of Music and is currently a Research Associate at Bard College Berlin. He is a Steinway Artist.
www.benjaminhochman.com