Palimpsests

The two related orchestral pieces that make up George Benjamin’s Palimpsests reflect the fastidious methods of a composer who, though born in London, has been influenced by the modern French school and made his name with music of atmospheric particularity, as well as formal intricacy. In the case of Palimpsests, written in 2000-02, the atmosphere relates to an idea of dawn in a desert, when the sun is low and the light horizontal. But the form is, as the title says, drawn from the idea of a palimpsest: a document where an older, often ancient text has been overlaid with something more recent. Benjamin translates this into music as an exercise in layers. Palimpsest I begins with something like a song for clarinets. The song gets buried beneath superimposed textures, to the point where it becomes barely discernible—although it’s still there, governing the material. And seemingly dormant, the song is resurrected in Palimpsest II, breaking to the surface to combine with the material that had buried it. Conceived in tribute to Pierre Boulez, Palimpsests uses an idiosyncratically assembled orchestra focused more on brass and wind than strings. The duration is about 20 minutes.