Written on Skin
Allan Clayton, Barbara Hannigan, Bejun Mehta, Christopher Purves, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Martin Crimp, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Rebecca Jo Loeb
Composer
The love duet in Scene IV shows part of what makes this score special. Totally avoiding maudlin opera-romance clichés, the two doomed lovers hover around an unearthly high note that is both sensuous and unsettling. George Benjamin avoids a lot of clichés in Written on Skin; in fact, it comes off as an unbroken stream of creativity with few misses. Taut, concise, palpably dramatic — it is a rare successful translation of the operatic form into the 21st century.