Written on Skin by George Benjamin – Aix Premiere

There are operas that arrive with the full weight of institutional expectation behind them — Covent Garden, Aix-en-Provence, Amsterdam, Florence all lined up like sponsors on a banner — and then somehow manage to justify every bit of it. Written on Skin is one of those, and this disc, captured in Aix just days after the premiere, makes the case with a vividness that is almost unseemly in its immediacy.

George Benjamin has been the most carefully husbanded talent in British music for forty years. Olivier Messiaen, who did not scatter praise lightly, heard the teenage Benjamin’s Ringed by the Flat Horizon and declared him a genuine composer. What followed was a career of almost painful deliberateness — each piece small, immaculate, the silence between works as eloquent as the works themselves. Into the Little Hill, his 2006 collaboration with the playwright Martin Crimp, felt like a man testing the temperature of a pool he had always meant to enter. Written on Skin is the dive.

Crimp has taken a 13th-century Occitan legend — the troubadour Guillaume de Cabestanh, his seduction of a nobleman’s wife, the husband’s murderous revenge, the wife’s consumption of her lover’s excised heart — and made of it something simultaneously archaic and brutally present. The three Angels who narrate and inhabit the story simultaneously give Crimp a Brechtian frame within which genuine passion can burn without sentimentality. Benjamin understood this perfectly. His music neither illustrates nor comments; it thinks.

What Benjamin has produced orchestrally is extraordinary. The scoring — chamber-sized but with a density of incident that makes it feel vast — draws on glass harmonica, viola da gamba, mandolin, and a battery of tuned percussion to create a sound world that is genuinely, unmistakably his own. Medieval resonances hover at the edge of the texture without ever becoming pastiche. You hear a phrase and think: no one else wrote that.

Barbara Hannigan’s Agnès is the interpretation of a career — her career, and she has had many remarkable ones. The voice has that quality peculiar to the finest singing actresses: you cannot separate the sound from the meaning. When Agnès first tastes the book — the illuminated manuscript the Boy has made, which becomes a kind of erotic object before it becomes a weapon — Hannigan’s tone thins to something almost transparent, and then suddenly there is an edge in it, something dangerous. It is a physical experience to hear. Christopher Purves’s Protector is implacable, the baritone line carved rather than sung, and Bejun Mehta — whose counter-tenor has an almost crystalline purity in the upper range — brings to Angel 1 and the Boy a quality that is neither male nor female, neither past nor present. Exactly right.

The conducting is Benjamin’s own. Some composer-conductors tend toward indulgence with their own scores; Benjamin tends the opposite direction. The tempos are firm, the textures kept clean even when the harmony is at its most labyrinthine, and the dynamic range — Nimbus’s engineers deserve credit here — is captured with unusual fidelity, from near-inaudible pianissimos to the opera’s several moments of controlled violence.

The Duet for Piano and Orchestra, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, fills out the set. It is early Benjamin — the harmonic language is already fully formed, the craftsmanship immaculate — but beside the opera it feels like what it is: a calling card from a younger man. Aimard plays it with characteristic precision and something close to affection.

Is this the recording against which future performances will be measured? Almost certainly. There will be other casts, other conductors — the work is already in the repertoire of major houses, and rightly so. But this one has the authority of origination, the slightly raw energy of first discovery. Written on Skin is the most considerable British opera since The Knot Garden, and possibly since Peter Grimes. That may sound extravagant. It isn’t.