‘…has a mastery many labour half a life-time to acquire.’
The Observer (Peter Heyworth), 31 August 1980
‘…Benjamin’s music seems to stop time, as fragments of the storm are suspended in mid-air: a cor anglais melody, an impassioned cello solo. The work opens and closes with the same gesture, a quiet bell chord, as if the whole piece has been a slow elaboration of a single moment, the still centre of a tornado.’
The Guardian (Tom Service), 11 July 2003
‘[Benjamin] led an electrifying performance that captured the music’s extremes of sudden stormy violence and uncanny stillness.’
Daily Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 7 August 2008
‘No British composer since Benjamin Britten announced himself so decisively as George Benjamin did in 1980 with his first orchestral work Ringed by the Flat Horizon when he was 19 and a first-year undergraduate at Cambridge. Almost 30 years later, it still seems a wondrous achievement, with the formal confidence, understanding of instrumental colour and texture, and lucid harmonic sense that have characterised his music ever since…’
The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 8 August 2008
‘The work contains some of the most startlingly precise storm music ever written-it seems less evocation than the sound of the thing itself. But there is more to it than that: Eliot’s lines suggested form for the music, and the piece is music, and not just illustration. It moves through an original and convincing musical logic which is realized through a masterly control of varied sonorities.’
Boston Globe (Richard Dyer), September 1987
‘This work is arresting for its power and menace’
The Age (Melbourne) (Clive O’Connell), 12 September 1994