Richard Rodney Bennett

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, CBE (born 29 March 1936, Broadstairs, Kent) is an English composer renowned for his film scores and his jazz performance as much as for his challenging concert works. He has lived in New York City since 1979.

Biography

Richard Rodney Bennett was a pupil at Leighton Park School, the Quaker school in Reading, studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew. During this time, he attended some of the Darmstadt summer courses, where he was exposed to serialism. He later spent two years in Paris as a student of the prominent serialist Pierre Boulez.

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 received a CBE in 1977, and was knighted in 1998.

As one of Britain’s most respected and versatile musicians, Bennett has produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television, as well as having been a writer and performer 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 has adopted an increasingly tonal idiom.

Anthony Meredith's biography of Bennett was published in November 2010.

Music

Despite his early studies in modernist techniques, Bennett's tastes are catholic. He has written in a wide range of styles, including jazz, which has particular fondness for. Early on, he found success by writing music for feature films, although he considered this to be subordinate to his concert music.^{[citation needed]}

Film & Television Scores

He has written music for films and television; among his scores are the Doctor Who story The Aztecs (1964) for television, and the feature film Billion Dollar Brain (1967). His scores for Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), each garnered him Academy Award nominations, with Murder on the Orient Express earning him a BAFTA award. Later works include Enchanted April (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), and The Tale of Sweeney Todd (1998). He is also a prolific composer of orchestral works, piano solos, choral works and operas. Despite this eclecticism, Bennett's music rarely involves crossover of styles.

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
• 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
• 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 (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)

Operas

• The Ledge - 1961
• The Midnight Thief (libretto by Ian Serraillier) - 1964
• The Mines of Sulphur - 1965
• A Penny for a Song - 1967
• Victory (libretto by Beverley Cross) - 1970

Choral works

• 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

Portrait bust of Richard Rodney Bennett

Richard Rodney Bennett sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait in clay. The correspondence file relating to the Bennett portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist.

Selected filmography

• Face in the Night (1957)

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

References

• Timothy Reynish, "British Wind Music", paper presented to the 2005 CBDNA National Conference

External links

• Richard Rodney Bennett biography and works on the UE website (publisher)
• Biography and list of works
• Richard Rodney Bennett at the Internet Movie Database
• Richard Rodney Bennett at Allmusic