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Richard Rodney Bennett

1936 - 2012

British

Summary

As one of Britain’s most respected and versatile musicians, Bennett produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television, as well as having been a writer and per former of jazz songs for fifty years. Studies with Boulez in the 1950s immersed him in the techniques of the European avant-garde, though he subsequently developed his own distinctive dramato-abstract style. In recent years, he adopted an increasingly tonal idiom. He was knighted for Services to Music in 1998.
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


Bennett was born into a musical family, and began composing as a child. Informal sessions with the pioneering British serialist Elisabeth Lutyens aroused an interest in the avant-garde which was left unsatisfied by the traditional teaching of Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson at the Royal Academy of Music, but assuaged by visits to the Darmstadt summer schools, and a two-year period of study in Paris with Pierre Boulez. A fellow-student was the pianist Susan Bradshaw, with whom Bennett later collaborated on a translation of Boulez’s theoretical writing, and formed a long-standing piano duet partnership. Other significant performing partnerships were to be with the soprano Jane Manning and the horn player Barry Tuckwell.

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

  • Scotland in Music
    • Scotland in Music
    • 20th January 2022
    • Ahead of Burns Night we highlight some of the best creatives from Scotland and other great works inspired by the lands north of the wall.
  • Judith Weir premiere at 2021 Festival of St Cecilia
    • Judith Weir premiere at 2021 Festival of St Cecilia
    • 12th November 2021
    • On November 17, the Festival of St Cecilia, the world premiere of the new anthem One day to sing, by Judith Weir will be performed by the Choirs of St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral...
  • Summer Listening: Double Bass Concertos
    • Summer Listening: Double Bass Concertos
    • 26th July 2019
    • With July coming to an end, so concludes the string portion of our Summer Listening series with a selection of concertos for the double bass. To quote Gunther Schuller, some of these concertos are "far removed from...
  • Northern Ballet revives The Great Gatsby
    • Northern Ballet revives The Great Gatsby
    • 23rd April 2019
    • This May, The Northern Ballet will tour their revival of David Nixon’s The Great Gatsby, a sumptuous ballet based on the music of Richard Rodney Bennett. Stopping first in Salford’s The Lowry from May 8-11, it...
  • Thea Musgrave | Stockholm International Composer Festival
    • Thea Musgrave | Stockholm International Composer Festival
    • 10th April 2018
    • The Stockholm International Composer Festival is one of the classical world’s most high-profile opportunities to discover the full breadth of a composer’s music.    This November in the Swedish capital’s...
  • Bennett: Orchestral Works Vol 1
    • Bennett: Orchestral Works Vol 1
    • 21st November 2017
    • The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and its Associate Guest Conductor John Wilson record for the first time together on Chandos, embarking on a new series devoted to the brilliant orchestral works of Sir Richard Rodney...
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Performances

7th June 2025

PERFORMERS
City of Birmingham Choir
CONDUCTOR
Adrian Lucas
LOCATION
Elgar Music Hall University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

26th July 2025

PERFORMERS
Bear Valley Music Festival
LOCATION
Bear Valley Music Tent, Bear Valley, CA, United States of America

26th July 2025

PERFORMERS
Bear Valley Music Festival
LOCATION
Bear Valley Music Tent, Bear Valley, CA, United States of America

26th July 2025

PERFORMERS
Bear Valley Music Festival
LOCATION
Bear Valley Music Tent, Bear Valley, CA, United States of America

2nd August 2025

PERFORMERS
Bear Valley Music Festival
LOCATION
Bear Valley Music Tent, Bear Valley, CA, United States of America
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Discography

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