George Benjamin is unique in British musical life.  He first made his mark as a composer and pianist on BBC Radio 3 at the age of thirteen.  As a student aged sixteen he was the youngest in Messiaen's famous class, but his composing had begun at the age of nine. Now he has become established as a conductor and conducts the best orchestras in the world (in 2006 he makes his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker) however it is as a composer that he has made the most impact on the international scene.

He was born in London in 1960.   From 1974 he studied with Peter Gellhorn.  In 1976 he went to the Paris Conservatoire in order to become Messiaen's pupil and have piano lessons with his wife, Yvonne Loriod.  At King's College Cambridge, where he attained a double-starred first degree, he was a pupil of Alexander Goehr.

Benjamin first came to public prominence attention when, in 1980, Ringed by the Flat Horizon was performed at the BBC Proms in London by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Mark Elder. Although by a composer still only twenty, it quickly established a remarkable international performance record, as did the two subsequent orchestral works, A Mind of Winter and At First Light.

George Benjamin has been the focus of numerous festivals in Europe, Japan and America. In March 1992 he directed a  series of concerts at the Opéra Bastille in Paris entitled  'Carte blanche à George Benjamin'.   He was the founding director of the "Meltdown Festival" at the South Bank in London in 1993, where his orchestral Sudden Time was premiered. In 1995 Benjamin was the composer in residence at the 75th Salzburg Festival In France; the opening concert included the premiere of his Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra.

 The LSO devoted a series of nine concerts throughout their 2002-3 season to Benjamin's music, entitled "BY GEORGE!", including the first performances of two major works  - the orchestral Palimpsests (conducted by its dedicatee, Pierre Boulez) and Shadowlines, written for the pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard.  Both Palimpsests and "BY GEORGE!" as a whole won RPS awards.  Multi-concert portraits of Benjamin’s music have been evident in 2005 in Berlin (with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester under Kent Nagano), Madrid (Spanish National Orchestra) and Strasbourg (Festival Musica).

In America, Benjamin's music has been widely performed; in recent seasons the orchestras in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles,  St. Louis and San Francisco have programmed his works. He has built up a particularly close relationship with the Tanglewood Festival and has frequently lectured and conducted there.  His most recent orchestral work, Dance Figures, was given its world premiere by the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim in May 2005; the same work will feature at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels in May 2006, choreographed by Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker.

 Benjamin's  reputation has particularly flourished in France; he was the awarded of the title of Chevalier dans l'ordre des arts et lettres in 1996. In 2006 he will return to Paris for a retrospective of his works mounted by the Festival d'Automne in collaboration with the Opera Bastille. In the last decade he has also worked with increasing frequency in  Germany and  has been elected to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, only the fourth time such an honour has been bestowed on a British composer. In 2001 he was awarded the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester's first ever Schoenberg Prize for composition.

Since 1980 most of Benjamin's works have been recorded by Nimbus Records, and two new CDs were released in 2004 to great critical acclaim. They include recordings of Palimpsests, Sudden Time, Viola,Viola and Shadowlines, as well as Benjamin performing his own early Piano Sonata.

George Benjamin lives in London, and is the Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King's College, London. From 1996 to 1999 he was artistic consultant to the BBC’s three year retrospective of the 20th Century music, "Sounding the Century".  As a conductor he has worked with many of the finest international orchestras, including the LSO, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. For many years he has maintained a particularly close relationship with two leading contemporary music ensembles - the London Sinfonietta and the Ensemble Modern, with whom he collaborates on a regular basis.