Today would have been the 80th birthday of Richard Rodney Bennett. Bennett could do it all, from twelve tone to torch songs, from film music to jazz. He was a brilliant musician who never really seemed to find his niche and continues to be undersold, despite the knighthood he acquired in 1998.
Bennett studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, with Howard Ferguson and Lennox Berkeley. Ferguson regarded him as perhaps the greatest talent of his generation, though lacking in a personal style – an assessment with which I happen to disagree, detecting the same fingerprints on his twelve tone works as on his compositions of more immediate appeal.
It’s interesting to note that Bennett also studied in Paris with Pierre Boulez, from 1957 to 1959. He had been exposed to serialism while attending summer courses in Darmstadt.
Bennett himself taught for a time at RAM (he was eventually the Chair of Composition there, from 1994 to the year 2000) and at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. For the last three decades of his life, he maintained a residence in New York City. He died there in 2012. His remains are buried in Brooklyn.
In all, he composed over 200 concert works, and 50 film scores, including music for “Far from the Madding Crowd,” ‘Nicholas and Alexandra,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Enchanted April” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
For 50 years, he was a writer and performer of jazz songs. He also arranged classics of the Great American Songbook.
The further his career progressed, the more tonal, melodic and ingratiating his concert music became. In point of fact, Bennett’s serialism had always been a personalized one. He later repudiated his serial works, stating, “I wouldn’t want anybody now to play my pieces from those days, when I was turning out that atonal stuff.”
Aside from his activities as a film composer and cabaret performer, he composed three symphonies, 17 concertos, five operas and dozens of chamber works. He had the attention and respect of his peers, with many of the world’s top musicians commissioning and performing his works, yet his music remains, somehow, less known than it should be.
Be that as it may, happy birthday, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett!
Here is the world premiere of his Symphony No. 2, in a concert broadcast from 1968:
His ingratiating “Partita for Orchestra,” from 1995:
Mov’t I: “Intrada” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRtZr4wdPNg
Mov’t II “Lullaby” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXDym-RkuB8
Mov’t III “Finale” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo6YheAcwLE
Richard Rodney Bennett sings torch songs:
Film music from “The Devil’s Disciple” (1959):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e2pCQpONV0
“Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994):
“Murder on the Orient Express” (1974):
PHOTO: Bennett wrote this “Suite for Skip and Sadie” for his two cats
