George Benjamin, who was born in London in 1960, wrote Sudden Time in 1993 for a remarkably large instrumental apparatus, but the diaphanous construction of the musical texture and the organisation of instruments into independent groups creates an effect more akin to chamber music than that of a large orchestra. To achieve individual qualities of sonorities and sound effects, Benjamin calls for some rather unusual instruments, such as a quartet of alto flutes, a pair of miniature recorders, a muted piano and a profusion of percussion instruments, including some tablas. As a composer, Benjamin exhibited his sensitivity for handling orchestral effects at a remarkably young age through a series of one movement, descriptive pieces. He first studied with Messiaen but his harmonic world even then boldly reflected influences of Berg, Boulez and Dutilleux rather than his teacher. Beginning in the 1980s, he moved towards contrapuntal methods of composing and in his treatment of harmony, strove increasingly for modal simplicity.

His work on Sudden Time embraced ten years. George Benjamin wrote the first sketches in 1983. The title is from Wallace Stevens' poem Martial Cadenza: “It was like sudden time in a world without time” To help comprehend the concept of this work, Benjamin wrote a foreword to the score in which he relates a dream he had: %u201CThe sound of a thunderclap seemed to stretch to at least a minute's duration before suddenly circulating, as if in a spiral, through my head. I then woke and realised that I was in fact experiencing merely the first second of a real thunder clap. Although this is but an analogy, a sense of elasticity, of things stretching, warping and coming together, is something I have tried to capture in this piece.

Benjamin's almost 15 minute opus comprises of two continuous movements. The first is a five minute turbulent introduction to the second, where a subliminal metre is perpetually distorted and then re-assembled. According to Benjamin, %u201Cthe resulting structure oscillates between focused pulsed simplicity and whirlpools of complex polyrhythms. An organised sense of continuity between these extremes is made possible by the fact that all the material, however plain or elaborate, is based on a few cells of great simplicity.” Benjamin realises vast climaxes through the pulse of the harmonic blocks created with modulations, as they contrast with each other, the most stunning example of which is the extremely difficult viola solo reaching across many octaves, which closes the work.