There’s an unsettling quality to the music. It never quite resolves, it doesn’t feel like it wants to resolve, perhaps it isn’t in a position to. Instead there are eddies and currents while being pulled in dark unfathomable depths. It’s a dark piece, heavy strings and yearning winds on a dying fall over and over while the soloist echoes or tries to focus. Then there’s an orchestral crunch, a collapsing into the snare-drum that feels like when your boot lands on a stone on a country path. So you might be walking and it’s not walking the way Elgar opens his first symphony but a more uncertain, unfocussed journey, as if the ground underfoot needs more attention to be able to cross the landscape. If not the broad paths and open skies of the Malverns, but the more rugged scrambles of the Calder Valley. More limestone grit than clay, where the geology is more evident yet also more mysterious.
It is a landscape where geology has often found a voice in music. Up the valleys, Harrison Birtwistle emerged with the movements of tectonic plates, as if the depths of the earth where making their presence felt. Tim Benjamin‘s movement is less stately and visceral but sat listening in Todmorden town hall it seems to speak to the surroundings just as the trumpet soloist seems to call over to the orchestra, a languid dialogue across the depths, so the piece transcends the Victorian tracery of the auditorium to the speckled valley in which it sits; not too rural, not too isolated but whose urban urbanity is tempered by a dark mythology that Ted Hughes identified in the same landscape.
Although, there’s also Miles Davies and the shining city, glistening in the rain and the pin-prick lights of streetlamps and cars. There’s light pollution in Todmorden as well but it also seems distant or as if through a haze. The cool sophistication of a late-night Manhattan sidewalk is caught in the back of the mind. Instead there’s another memory, from the opening of the concert, of the last post and an awareness that this is Remembrance weekend and that for the composer there is a power and a story connected with those world conflicts, that appears expressed in the music; a recollection of war and a soldier’s thoughts of their home, and that landscape. If it doesn’t resolve, it’s maybe because the trauma is too great and that only a sense of it is ever able to be expressed, an indication of those dark and unfathomable depths, as Benjamin says “neither “happy” nor “sad”, or perhaps both”. Evocations told in the music, urgent and urging and powerfully equivocal.
https://timbenjamin.com/music/concerto-for-trumpet-and-orchestra/
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