Richard Rodney Bennett Richard Rodney Bennett

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, CBE (29 March 1936 – 24 December 2012) was an English composer of film, TV and concert music, and also a jazz pianist. He was based in New York City from 1979 until his death there in 2012.

Life and career

Bennett was born at Broadstairs, Kent, but was raised in Devon during World War II. His mother, Joan Esther (Spink), was a pianist who had trained with Gustav Holst and sang in the first professional performance of The Planets. His father, Rodney Bennett, (1890–1948) was a children's book author and poet, who worked with Roger Quilter on his theatre works and provided new words for some of the numbers in the Arnold Book of Old Songs.

Bennett was a pupil at Leighton Park School. He later studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew. Ferguson regarded him as extraordinarily brilliant, having perhaps the greatest talent of any British composer in his generation, though lacking in a personal style. During this time, Bennett attended some of the Darmstadt summer courses in 1955, where he was exposed to serialism. He later spent two years in Paris as a student of the prominent serialist Pierre Boulez between 1957 and 1959. He always used both his first names after finding another Richard Bennett active in music.

Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music between 1963 and 1965, at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, United States from 1970 to 1971, and was later International Chair of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music between 1994 and the year 2000. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1977, and was knighted in 1998.

Bennett produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television. He was also a writer and performer of jazz songs for fifty years. Immersed in the techniques of the European avant-garde via his contact with Boulez, Bennett subsequently developed his own dramato-abstract style. In his later years, he adopted an increasingly tonal idiom.

Bennett regularly performed as a jazz pianist, with such singers as Cleo Laine, Marion Montgomery (until her death in 2002), Mary Cleere Haran (until her death in 2011), and more recently with Claire Martin, performing the Great American Songbook. Bennett and Martin performed at such venues as The Oak Room at The Algonquin in New York (which closed in 2012), and The Pheasantry and Ronnie Scott's in London.

In later years, in addition to his musical activities, Bennett became known as an artist working in the medium of collage. He exhibited these collages several times in England, including at the Holt Festival, Norfolk in 2011, and at the Swaledale Festival, Yorkshire, in 2012. The first ever exhibition of his collages was in London in 2010, at the South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre, curated by the Nightingale Project, a charity that takes music and art into hospitals. Bennett was a patron of this charity. Bennett is honoured with four photographic portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Anthony Meredith's biography of Bennett was published in November 2010. Bennett is survived by his sister Meg (born 1930), the poet M. R. Peacocke, with whom he collaborated on a number of vocal works.

Bennett's cremated remains are buried in section 112, plot 45456 at Green-wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Music

Despite his early studies in modernist techniques, Bennett's tastes were catholic. He wrote in a wide range of styles, including jazz, for which he had a particular fondness. Early on, he began to write music for feature films. He said that it was as if the different styles of music that he was writing went on 'in different rooms, albeit in the same house'. Later in his career the different aspects all became equally celebrated – for example in his 75th birthday year (2011), there were numerous concerts featuring all the different strands of his work. At the BBC Proms for example his Murder on the Orient Express Suite was performed in a concert of film music, and in the same season his Dream Dancing and Jazz Calendar were also featured. Also at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 23 March 2011 (a few days before Bennett's 75th birthday), a double concert took place in which his Debussy-inspired piece Sonata After Syrinx was performed in the first concert, and in the Late Night Jazz Event which followed, Bennett and Claire Martin performed his arrangements of the Great American Songbook (Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein and so on). See also Tom Service's appreciation of Bennett's music published in The Guardian in July 2012.

Film and television scores

He wrote music for films and television; among his scores were the Doctor Who story The Aztecs (1964) for television, and the feature films Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Lady Caroline Lamb (1972) and Equus (1977). His scores for Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), each earned him Academy Award nominations, with Murder on the Orient Express gaining a BAFTA award. Later works include Enchanted April (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), and The Tale of Sweeney Todd (1998). He was also a prolific composer of orchestral works, piano solos, choral works and operas. Despite this eclecticism, Bennett's music rarely involved stylistic crossover.

Selected works

Instrumental works

• Sonata for piano (1954, first published work)
• Impromptus (for guitar) (1968)
• Concerto for alto saxophone
• Concerto for Stan Getz (tenor sax, timpani & strings)
• Dream Sequence for cello and piano – first performed in December 1994 at the Wigmore Hall, London by Julian Lloyd Webber and John Lenehan
• Elegy for Davis
• Harpsichord Concerto (1980). Premiere conducted by Leonard Slatkin. St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Richard Rodney Bennett, harpsichord.
• Fanfare for brass quintet (2012)
• Farnham Festival Overture (1964) for orchestra
• The Four Seasons (1991) for Symphonic Wind Ensemble
• A Little Suite, based on selections from his song cycles The Insect World and The Aviary.
• Morning Music for wind band
• Music for Strings
• Party Piece for orchestra
• Reflections on a Sixteenth Century Tune for string orchestra or double wind quintet (1999)
• Sonata for solo guitar (1983)
• Sonatina for solo clarinet
• Summer Music for flute and piano
• Symphony No. 1 (1965)
• Symphony No. 2 (1968) commissioned by the New York Philharmonic
• Symphony No. 3 (1987)
• Trumpet Concerto for trumpet and wind orchestra
• Scena II (for solo cello; commissioned by the Music Department of the University College of North Wales, Bangor, with funds provided by the Welsh Arts Council, and first performed by Judith Mitchell on 25 April 1974
• Partridge Pie (based on The 12 Days of Christmas)
• After Syrinx I for oboe and piano
• Marimba Concerto for marimba and orchestra
• Lilliburlero Variations for 2 pianos (2008) commissioned by the Dranoff 2 Piano Foundation in Miami

Operas

• The Ledge – 1961
• The Midnight Thief (libretto by Ian Serraillier) – 1964
• The Mines of Sulphur (libretto by Beverley Cross) – 1965
• A Penny for a Song – 1967
• All the King's Men (libretto by Beverley Cross) – 1968
• Victory (libretto by Beverley Cross) – 1970

Ballet

• Jazz Calendar – 1968
• Isadora – 1981

Choral and vocal works

• A Good-Night – 1999
• Missa Brevis – 1990
• Sea Change – 1983
• Spells, written for soprano Jane Manning
• Out of Your Sleep
• On Christmas Day to My Heart, written in 1998 for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's College Chapel, Cambridge in 1999.
• The Garden – A Serenade to Glimmerglass, commissioned by Nicholas Russell for Glimmerglass Opera in honour of Stewart Robertson for its Young American Artists Program – 2006
• The Birds Lament
• "Tom o' Bedlam's Song" (voice and cello) – 1961

Albums

Solo:

• 2007 "Richard Rodney Bennett: Words And Music" (Chandos)
• 2002 Take Love Easy (Audiophile)
• 1995 A Different Side of Sondheim (DRG)
• 1994 Harold Arlen's Songs (Audiophile)
• 1992 "I Never Went Away" (Delos)

with Marion Montgomery

• 1977 Surprise Surprise
• 1978 Town and Country
• 1984 Puttin' On the Ritz

with Carol Sloane (singer)

• 1989 Love You Madly (Contemporary)

with Chris Connor (singer)

• 1991 Classic (Contemporary)
• 1991 New Again (Contemporary)

with Mary Cleere Haran (singer)

• 1995 This Funny World: Mary Cleere Haran Sings Lyrics By Hart (Varese Sarabande)
• 1998 Pennies From Heaven: Movie Songs From The Depression Era (Angel Records)
• 1999 The Memory Of All That: Gershwin On Broadway and In Hollywood (2011 reissue)
• 2002 Crazy Rhythm: Manhattan in the 20's (Varese Sarabande)

with Claire Martin

• 2005 When Lights Are Low
• 2010 Witchcraft
• 2013 Say It Isn't So

Opera

• 2005 The Mines of Sulphur (Chandos)

Orchestral

• 1968 Symphony No. 1 (with works by Bax and Berkeley) – Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Igor Buketoff (RCA)
• 1972 Jazz Calendar / Piano Concerto – Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich, London Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Gibson (Philips)
• 1979 Spells / Aubade – Jane Manning, Philharmonia Orchestra, David Willcocks, David Atherton (Argo)
• 1995 Partita / Four Jazz Songs / Enchanted April Suite – Britten Sinfonia, Nicholas Cleobury, the composer, Neil Richardson (BBC)
• 1996 Diversions / Symphony No. 3 / Concerto for Violin and Orchestra – Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, James DePreist (Koch)

Choral

• 2013 Letters to Lindbergh (Signum UK)
• 2013 Sea Change: Choral Music of Richard Rodney Bennett – The Cambridge Singers, the composer and John Rutter (Collegium Records)

Selected TV and filmography