Ten days ago the maestro-superstar Gustavo Dudamel was summoned back home to Venezuela to conduct the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra at the state funeral of President Hugo Chávez. He could hardly refuse: the president's office provides around half the funding for El Sistema, the country's high-profile education system with which Dudamel is indelibly associated.
After zigzagging continents between Caracas and LA, he is now in London for a short residency at the Barbican with his Los Angeles Philharmonic, the elite orchestra of which he is music director. Never one to sleep, he has also found time to sprinkle musical gold dust over 100 young musicians from Tower Hamlets, Barking, Dagenham and beyond.
Yet what had promised to be the big story of the season – Dudamel's mere presence – turned out to be quite another. Apologising for his quaint English, the 32-year-old ball of energy told us what we should really be celebrating: a mainstream concert hall, a large crowd and the music of three composers all alive and present! John Adams to conduct his own music, Joseph Pereira – the LA Phil's principal timpanist – as soloist in his own Percussion Concerto, and Unsuk Chin, an elegant and discreet member of the audience for her new work Graffiti.
To open the concert, Adams, a popular London presence who was also here for The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012), danced his way through the lithe Son of Chamber Symphony (2007). Then it was Dudamel's turn. Reassuring us, as he adjusted his music stand, that his super-high podium was not evidence of his egomania but necessary on account of his less than gigantic size, he led sober, illuminating performances of the Pereira and the Chin, both European premieres.
We've seen plenty of the Dude in other guises: the showman mambo-ing in Venezuelan colours with his young Bolívars, or wringing every last drop of emotion out of Mahler (a new CD of the Ninth Symphony is just out). To encounter Dudamel now as fierce champion of today's music was a revelation. The Pereira concerto, full of aural strangeness and passing adventure, made joy out of textural contrasts. The composer-soloist switched from drums to marimba to vibraphone with persuasive ease, winning alert support from his fellow LA players.
Unsuk Chin's multilayered Graffiti, a weightier piece, celebrated the idea of street art, from primitive to refined, labyrinthine to stark. Dense, skittering strings in the first movement, cascades of tubular bells and gongs in the second and urgent brass chords in the final "passacaglia" created a work of singularity and authority. Hers is a rare voice which commands your attention. At the end the audience wanted to cheer the charismatic conductor they had welcomed so warmly at the start. But again and again, as he had all evening, Dudamel ushered his composers to the fore and stepped away from the limelight.
All told, these are astonishing times for the new. "A hot story within a cool frame" is the librettist Martin Crimp's pithy but accurate assessment of George Benjamin's sell-out Written on Skin, which received its UK premiere at Covent Garden last week in a production by Katie Mitchell conducted by the composer. Imagine jealousy, sex and a feast of human viscera – as in (actually) eat your heart out – handled with the ornamental perfection of an illuminated miniature and you get the idea.
This pan-European commission, shared with Aix-en-Provence, Amsterdam, Toulouse and Florence, was first seen in Aix last July. It has been hailed a masterpiece. Benjamin also collaborated with Crimp in his only other opera, the short chamber piece Into the Little Hill (2006), based on the Pied Piper of Hamelin tale. The new work, 95 minutes long and with no interval, revisits another violent legend, an Occitan ballad from the 13th century whose subtitle could be: women, beware artists.
Men, notably bragging husbands, might be cautioned to take care, too. A rich landowner, the Protector (Christopher Purves), commissions a younger artist, the Boy (Bejun Mehta), to portray his life and wealth and that of his youthful wife, Agnès (Barbara Hannigan) in a vellum manuscript. The Boy elaborates their destinies in his own way. He and Agnès fall in love, with fateful and monstrous consequences.
In his first utterance the Protector, performed with brilliance and subtlety by the formidable Purves, sings of his possessions: the fields, the vines, the night stars, the pink eglantine, the obedient body of his wife. We know this kind of man, having met him in the castle of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard. Here, however, his boasts and bullyings are confined, sieved and purified into music of exquisite detail.
Even as a child, Benjamin had a love of the meticulous, which he has attributed to his parents, who shared that trait. Precision was the vital essence of Ringed By the Flat Horizon, written when Benjamin was 19 and premiered at the BBC Proms in 1980 when he was still a student. It gives his music a gleam and, in workings but not sound, a mechanical dazzle which never falters. It also tends to keep the listener at arm's length.
The mood of alienation is underlined by Crimp's excessive use of the third person. But the text is otherwise sturdy, poetic and easy to hear. Three sections, subdivided into scenes, each characterised by specific musical features, provide the work with a clear structure. Voices are given prominence, orchestration restrained except in pivotal instrumental outbursts.
The duets between Mehta's countertenor and Hannigan's soprano, each of them agile, expressive and flexible, had ethereal lightness. Benjamin wrote the roles for this impeccable cast. Orchestral timbres are sensuous and minutely shaded, from the smoky drifts of woodwind at the end of Part One, to the glacial weight of the Protector's anger – blurts of low brass – in Part Three. Tiny atomic beads of harmony or timbre bump against each other but remain discrete, never melding into a wash of sound. Benjamin has used viols and mandolin in previous works but never, as far as I know, the eerie yawl of a glass harmonica.
Mitchell's over-fussy production, stylishly designed by Vicki Mortimer and lit by Jon Clark, takes place chiefly in a medieval room. The rest of the action, featuring some black-suited angels including Mehta and a superb Allan Clayton, is set in a modern laboratory-cum-archive-cum-dressing room. Watching the opera twice (first and second nights) from different parts of the auditorium, I found my attention always fell on the "past", with the "present" making little impact – except when Agnès exits up an elegant, minimal staircase followed by angels in slow motion while the music gutters and sputters to a finish.
If Mehta, the Boy/Angel, is the artist, we see nothing of his work. Any writing "on skin" is done through erotic encounters in this strange love triangle, or through the exacting stylus of George Benjamin himself. Given his operatic form so far, this composer's ideas grow larger and more intriguing with each endeavour. Can he now burst outside this "cool frame" and overwhelm us, as well as beguile?
