Despite a shortage of connective tissue in this season opener, principal conductor Edward Gardner ensured there was plenty to like in a centuries-spanning programme that ranged from Beethoven to George Benjamin.
The latter, the orchestra’s latest composer-in-residence, was represented not by a new commission but by the piece that kickstarted the 20-year-old prodigy’s career back in 1980. Ringed by the Flat Horizon takes its title from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and its inspiration from a dramatic photograph of a thunderstorm lowering over the New Mexico desert. At 19 coruscating minutes, it’s surprisingly verbose for the famously terse Benjamin, but with Gardner’s meticulous blend of vitality and precision the sense of youthful inspiration rarely faltered.
