Richard Rodney Bennett
1936 - 2012
British
Summary
Critical Acclaim
Bennett comes up with a huge range of striking colours and translucent textures to match words perfectly designed for music. The scoring for unaccompanied choir is hugely imaginative. — George Hall, The Independent on Sunday(Bennett) is a wonder fully natural lyric composer. The highlight was his version of the full text of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, conceived as an exquisite, dreamy ballad, which Lemalu floated magically. — Andrew Clements, The Guardian
Biography
As a composer, Bennett never fully took on board the whole complex Boulezian apparatus, instead adopting what Stephen Walsh has called "a neo-Romantic serialism closer to Berg than Webern". This proved well suited to operatic composition, but he never found the experience of working in the opera house congenial, and after 1970 he abandoned the medium. However, he continued to cover a wide range of other genres, ranging from the major orchestral and choral works Epithalamion, Spells and three symphonies, by way of concertos for almost every instrument - if you include such notable concertante pieces as Actaeon with solo horn and Sonnets to Orpheus with solo cello - to song-cycles and instrumental solos. Many of his smaller works of the 1970s fall into series, including the sequence of pieces called Scena for solo instruments, and the group of ensemble works called Commedia, schematic in ground-plan but dramatic in approach.
Bennett composed film scores ever since his student years: an activity which he described as musical "journalism", but one to which he brought a strong gift for melody and for the immediate creation of mood. His film work brought him many awards, as well as the financial security which, in his words, "allowed me to write the music I wanted to write". One of his first film scores was in a jazz idiom, and he supported himself as a student by playing jazz piano. This led later to partnerships with singers including Karin Krog, Marian Montgomery and Mary Cleere Haran, and to his own cabaret performances as both pianist and singer. He also composed concert works in a true jazz idiom, including Rondel in centenary homage to Duke Ellington.
For some years Bennett considered the different strands of his compositional activity - concert music, film music, jazz, and (yet another area of expertise) simple music for young performers - as entirely separate from one another. But the direct contact with audiences which his cabaret performances brought him encouraged him to reach out to the general concert-goer. In the later 1980s, a group of pieces suggested by Debussy’s Syrinx for solo flute exemplified a trend to bring some of the colouristic sensuality of his film scores into his concert works; and in 1990 a Concerto originally intended for the jazz saxophonist Stan Getz had at least an element of "crossover".
By 1995, the BT Celebration orchestral commission Partita was clearly, unashamedly tonal. And in these pluralist days, Bennett seemed confident and relaxed enough to have settled into a freely tonal idiom, encompassing equally the chromaticism of the choral work The Glory and the Dream, the sophisticated simplicity of the nursery-rhyme cycle Songs before Sleep and the lyricism of Reflections on a Scottish Folk Song written at the request of HRH The Prince of Wales in memory of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: this is clearly the music he wanted to write, and music of genuinely broad appeal.
Anthony Burton
News
Performances
25th April 2024
- PERFORMERS
- Spokane Symphony
- CONDUCTOR
- James Lowe
- LOCATION
- Fox Theater Spokane, Spokane, WA, United States of America
9th June 2024
- PERFORMERS
- Sammamish Symphony
- CONDUCTOR
- Adam Stern
- LOCATION
- Eastlake High School, sammamish, WA, United States of America
Features
- The Great Gatsby and other works by Richard Rodney Bennett
- In Spring 2022 Northern Ballet will tour their revival of David Nixon’s The Great Gatsby, a sumptuous ballet based on the music of Richard Rodney Bennett. We highlight this and other great works from the British composer.