Composer Benjamin Makes Bold L.A. Debut

One virtue of the Green Umbrella series is the expressive opportunity it offers musicians who often arrive as hyphenates. Tuesday at the Japan America Theatre, British composer-conductor-pianist George Benjamin made an impressive debut here, with a program that showed what he’s made of, how he feels about music, and how he thinks it should go.

Framing the concert were two of his own pieces, “Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra,” from 1994-95, and “At First Light,” circa 1982. In both pieces, though in different ways, Benjamin (b. 1960) handily avoids stifling stylistic dogma, and builds energy and intrigue through juxtapositions of ideas. Knotty skeins of phrasing quiver beneath longer-toned solo parts, and rhythm becomes a fluid dialogue between insistent pulses and freer time.

In the earlier piece, extended abstract gestures suddenly yield to a brief passage of sensuous, almost jazz-flavored chords, before heading “out” again. Benjamin’s music never becomes one thing or another, heeding the charm of ambivalence, of carefully suspended emotional content.

The evening’s boldest revelation, though, came from composer Unsuk Chin, whom Benjamin has championed. Her piece “Acrostic-Wordplay” is a wild enticement for fans of enlightened balderdash, in which a singer--not just any singer here, but the ever-flexible Susan Narucki--navigates a fractured fairy-tale language from texts by Lewis Carroll and Michael Ende. Meanwhile, the 10-piece ensemble adeptly tackled a score rich with nuance, textural effects and microtonal moments. Innocence and sophistication met, and bonded.

Revealing another aspect of his musical life, we heard Benjamin’s sensitive reading of the solo piano piece “La bouscarle,” by Olivier Messiaen, one of Benjamin’s teachers. Delicate and volatile, by turns, Benjamin respected the work’s abrupt shifts and fleeting joys, evoking the natural phenomena of Messiaen’s beloved bird song.