Sir Richard Rodney BennettCBE (29 March 1936 – 24 December 2012) was an English composer of film, TV and concert music, and also a jazz pianist and occasional vocalist. He was based in New York City from 1979 until his death there in 2012.[2]
Life and career
Bennett was born at Broadstairs, Kent, but was raised in Devon during World War II.[2] His mother, Joan Esther, née Spink (1901–1983)[3] was a pianist who had trained with Gustav Holst and sang in the first professional performance of The Planets.[4][5] His father, Rodney Bennett (1890–1948), was a children's book author, poet and lyricist, 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.[6] He later studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson and Lennox Berkeley. 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.[7] 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.[8]
Bennett produced over 200 works for the concert hall, and 50 scores for film and television. He was also a writer and performer of jazz songs for 50 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.
In later years, in addition to his musical activities, Bennett became known as an artist working in the medium of collage.[9] He exhibited these collages several times in England, including at the Holt Festival, Norfolk[10] in 2011, and at the Swaledale Festival, Yorkshire, in 2012.[11] The first 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.[12] Bennett is honoured with four photographic portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Bennett was gay[13] and in 1995 Gay Times nominated him as one of the most influential gay people in music.[14]
Anthony Meredith's biography of Bennett was published in November 2010.[15] 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. His grave is marked by a grey granite headstone.[16]
Music
Despite his early studies in modernist techniques, Bennett's tastes were eclectic. 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'.[9] 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 his 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 Hart and so on). See also Tom Service's appreciation of Bennett's music published in The Guardian in July 2012.[17]
Scena II (1973) - for solo cello; commissioned by the Music Department of the University College of North Wales, Bangor, with funds from Welsh Arts Council, first performed by Judith Mitchell 25 April 1974
The Glory and the Dream (2000), chorus a cappella and 1 instrument, text Wordsworth
The Garden – A Serenade to Glimmerglass (2006) - commissioned by Nicholas Russell for Glimmerglass Opera in honour of Stewart Robertson for its Young American Artists Program
Albums
Solo:
I Never Went Away (1992) - Delos
Harold Arlen's Songs (1994) - Audiophile
A Different Side of Sondheim (1995) - DRG
Take Love Easy (2002) - Audiophile
Richard Rodney Bennett: Words And Music (2007) - Chandos
Bennett: Orchestral Works, Vol 2 (2018) - Concerto for Stan Getz; Symphony No. 2; Serenade; Partita, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, John Wilson, Chandos
Bennett: Orchestral Works, Vol 3 (2019) - Symphony No. 1; A History of the Dansant; Reflections on a 16th Century Tune; Zodiac, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, John Wilson, Chandos
Bennett: Orchestral Works, Vol 4 (2020) - Aubade; Piano Concerto; Anniversaries; Country Dances, Book One, Troubadour Music, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, John Wilson, Chandos
^"The Nightingale Project". The Nightingale Project. Archived from the original on 14 May 2008. Retrieved 15 May 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
