Recent reviews

10/2008, BBC Music Magazine
Into the Little Hill

Along with the surge of productivity there has been a remarkable widening of his music’s expressive territory. It can now be simple and sparse as well as luxuriant, and emphatic as well as allusive.
This CD gives an excellent overview of the new Benjamin, in superb sound and performances. The centrepiece is his 2006 opera Into the Little Hill, a retelling of the Pied Piper legend as a dark political allegory. The savage opening is a shock, the two singers, the two singers Anu Komsi and Hilary Summers hurling out the words ›Kill them, they bite‹ (referring not just to rats but to Undesirables in general). Thereafter the music lives mostly in a twilit realm of dark sonorities and whispered encounters, riven occasionally by sudden loud shocks. The two singers switch between their many roles with great dramatic flair, and the Ensemble Modern under Franck Ollu gives the score just the right dangerous beauty, like a cat waiting to pounce. [...]

Ivan Hewett