‘…fascinating to hear Benjamin’s quite extraordinary ear for harmony and texture …’
Financial Times (Andrew Clements), 29 September 1987
‘…disciplined, engaging, and very beautiful.’
The Observer (Andrew Porter), 1 August 1993
‘It starts like an episode of The Clangers, those strange panpipe-voiced moonlings, but soon the flutes join in whining and bending their notes like the wind in the eaves, the Yamahas emit not notes but long eerie exhaltations, and the trombones rasp loud and deep enough to scare the horses. It was a magnificently unlistenable ghost-train ride into the musical anarchy of post-serialism.’
The Times (Matthew Conway), 5 February 2002
‘Benjamin augurs well to become the most important British composer of his generation…a 20-minute essay that dazzles as much for its textures (from lush strings to the wham of an orchestral anvil) as it does for its alert rhythmic scheme.’
San Francisco Examiner, 29 September 1989
‘sounds merge with the live sounds of flutes, brass, percussion and strings. So complete is the sonic transformation by the end that one can’t be sure which is live, which is Memorex.
If this sounds like a simplistic duel between folkloric naiveté and machine-like intellectual rigor, it isn’t. The synthesized Peruvian panpipe sounds and loud clangs derived from ‘playing’ the pipe work of the Centre Pompidou (where IRCAM is housed) float through the subtly colourful textures like ghostly echoes of a past very ancient and very new. Seldom in any live electronic work have spontaneity and calculation coexisted so masterfully.’
Chicago Tribune (John von Rhein), 23 March 2004
‘…A cityscape of energy in sound…’
New York Times (Bernard Holland), 20 May 2006