Richard Rodney Bennett: versatile and prolific, his music embraced multiple genres
Richard Rodney Bennett was one of the most talented and versatile composers the UK has ever produced. His prolific output embraced concert works that ranged in style from hard-hitting avant-garde grittiness to unashamedly tuneful neo-romanticism; he also produced a steady stream of scores for film and television, as well as pursuing a parallel career as a jazz pianist and singer. Based in New York City from 1979, after which much of his music became more tonal and accessible than in his early years, he was knighted for services to music in 1998.
Bennett once described his sudden compositional leaps between musical genres as reflecting discrete creative activities that nevertheless took place (metaphorically) in different rooms of the same house. Yet, in spite of his eclecticism, a consistent creative personality pervades all his music, thanks to his distinctive harmonic palette and formidable understanding of effective instrumentation. As pianist and composer Susan Bradshaw commented, ‘No composer of his generation did more to develop the stylistic middle ground of 20th-century music. Amiably persuasive rather than confrontational, his work attracted performers at every level.’
Richard Rodney Bennett: the early years and influential teachers
As a teenager, Bennett studied privately with composer Elisabeth Lutyens – becoming, in his own description, one of her ‘groupies’. As a champion of serial techniques, Lutyens gave him the ‘shot in the arm’ that he felt he needed in order to develop as a composer. More orthodox studies followed at the Royal Academy of Music in 1953-6, where his teachers included Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson.
In 1956, Bennett gave the UK premiere of Pierre Boulez’s First Piano Sonata, and asked the French composer for composition lessons. Thanks to a French government grant, Bennett studied with Boulez for two years in Paris (1957-9), and during this period he also attended summer schools at Darmstadt. Boulez encouraged him to analyse the music of Webern, which Bennett described as being ‘so simple and yet so marvellously put together’.
Richard Rodney Bennett: jazz and atonality
As Bennett’s composing matured, he kept his parallel interest in jazz separate from his often near-atonal concert music. The dichotomy was starkly illustrated by an LP issued in 1971. One side contained his recently completed Piano Concerto, its first movement dissonant, muscular and aggressive. On the other side was Jazz Calendar (1964), a work for jazz ensemble couched in an easy-going cool style, which became the basis for a ballet choreographed by Frederick Ashton. These two distinct stylistic streams only merged relatively late in his career, notably in the Concerto for Stan Getz (1990), written for the famous American jazz saxophonist at the suggestion of film composer John Williams; sadly, Getz died before he could perform it.
Between 1956 and ’94, Bennett also composed concertos for (in chronological order) horn, oboe, guitar, viola, violin, double bass, harpsichord, clarinet, marimba, percussion, trumpet and bassoon. His prodigious output came to include three symphonies, four string quartets, numerous other chamber and orchestral works, and a sizeable quantity of vocal and choral music. The three-act opera The Mines of Sulphur (1965) is a good example of the sophisticated serial writing and resourceful orchestration characterising much of his music in his early years. Bennett described the opera’s score as ‘very lavish’, and ‘like a glittering cloud’.
Richard Rodney Bennett: composing for films
Bennett composed his first film score when he was 19. Like many emerging film composers at the time, he started out writing music for documentaries, and then found that the far more lucrative work provided by feature films helped subsidise his concert composing. His film scores embraced a wide range of genres, including thrillers, horror films, comedies, period dramas and big-budget epics. He was nominated for an Academy Award on three occasions: for Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974).
Bennett enjoyed particularly fruitful collaborations with the directors John Schlesinger and Sidney Lumet. His work for Schlesinger began with the New Wave comedy Billy Liar (1963) and climaxed with Far from the Madding Crowd. A highlight of his rich orchestral score for the latter is the long montage that carries the viewer through the progress of the protagonists’ courtship: individual details are graphically illustrated in the music along the way, but the whole sequence is bound together by a musical logic in which subtle motivic hints of the love theme gradually coalesce into the emergence of the full melody.
Murder on the Orient Express
His most opulent score for Lumet was Murder on the Orient Express, which begins with a flamboyant main-title sequence in which Bennett himself plays the piano part in kitsch romantic-concerto style, this idiom alternating with 1930s dance-band pastiche. The following montage flashback eerily recounts a baby’s kidnap and murder, and here his avant-garde tendencies superbly support the sense of horror, with crushingly dissonant stinger chords accompanying each newspaper headline as it flashes on screen. This cue is later recapitulated as Poirot gives his explanation for the murder, the chords now synchronised with the stabs of the weapon.
Famously, Bennett wrote a scintillating waltz to characterise the glamour of the title train, because he thought ‘What I must do is make that train dance!’ (The distinguished but inveterately gloomy Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann was singularly unimpressed, however, entirely failing to understand how such a lightweight tune could accompany a ‘train of death’.) Unfortunately for the film’s sound editor, who had spent six weeks researching authentic steam-train sound effects, the latter were summarily jettisoned when Lumet told him: ‘We’ve heard a train leave the station … but we’ve never heard a train leave the station in 3/4 time.’ Bennett’s music for Lumet’s disturbing psychological drama Equus (1977) was very different, being scored for violin-less string orchestra and referencing – for a specific dramatic reason – the darkly melancholic idiom of certain moments in Bach’s passions.
Richard Rodney Bennett: composing for television
In the late 1970s, Bennett’s growing distrust of the commercial bias of cinema led him to work increasingly in television. The high point of his output in this field was his colourful orchestral score for the BBC’s dramatisation of Gormenghast (2000). The producer wanted ‘music of dreamlike quality which plumbed the undercurrents of the soul’, but which would also firmly ground Mervyn Peake’s bizarre story in a British musical landscape. ‘Being told that I was wanted because I continue the English tradition was very inspiring to me,’ reflected Bennett.
His occasional forays back into film work included a score for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which at the end of the century remained the most commercially successful British film ever made. But this project was a bitter reminder of the reasons Bennett had largely left film-scoring behind: much of his music was discarded and replaced by pop songs aimed at a youth audience, and he dismissed the film’s release soundtrack as ‘a disaster musically’.
Richard Rodney Bennett: jazz pianist and cabaret performer
Bennett’s talents as a jazz pianist and cabaret performer first emerged in his early Paris years when, like fellow composer Lalo Schifrin, he moonlighted in jazz clubs while pursuing his more ‘serious’ studies. In 1975, he recorded Richard Rodney Bennett Plays George Gershwin and Billy Mayerl, and received a fan letter from Walton saying this ‘superb’ disc had reduced him to ‘tears of nostalgia’.
In 1978, Bennett was pianist and vocalist in a jazz-trio album of songs by Stephen Sondheim (who had suggested to Lumet that he hire Bennett for Orient Express). Later in his career he enjoyed longstanding jazz partnerships with singers Marion Montgomery and Claire Martin, including appearances at Ronnie Scott’s famous London jazz club.
Richard Rodney Bennett: critical colleagues
Bennett’s extraordinary versatility and technical brilliance, whether as composer or performer, did not always endear him to older musicians, who may perhaps have been a tad envious of both his talents and his successes. After his album of Sondheim’s songs was released, Bennett recalled that he received a ‘less than totally gracious letter from Steve … along the lines of “I wish you had contacted me when making the album, and then I could have helped you avoid some of the mistakes”.’
Even worse, having dedicated The Mines of Sulphur to Britten, he was poleaxed after its premiere to receive a substantial letter from him which went to inordinate lengths to criticise almost all fundamental aspects of the piece (opining, for instance, that it suffered from bland ideas, a lack of characterisation and even that ‘just loud top notes do not make a climax’). Bennett described this school-teacherly diatribe as ‘mean-spirited’, and it seems plausible that Britten may in part have been piqued by that the opera’s commission had been diverted from his Aldeburgh Festival to Sadler’s Wells.
A delicious dose of poetic justice was meted out to Britten in March 1972, however, when prime minister Edward Heath held a dinner at 10 Downing Street to celebrate Walton’s 70th birthday. Bennett, Britten and an inebriated Malcolm Arnold were all sitting in close proximity. Arnold suddenly grabbed Britten – who was notoriously untactile – by the lapels of his jacket, and loudly declaimed: ‘You know, Ben, this Richard Rodney Bennett is a f***ing good composer! He’s better than you!’
Richard Rodney Bennett's style
British influences Bennett’s native musical heritage is especially reflected in his writing for strings: his viola-dominated film score for Lady Caroline Lamb (1972; below) recalls Finzi and Walton, while reminiscences of Vaughan Williams and Tippett pervade his Reflections on a Sixteenth-Century Tune (1999). Walton’s extrovert dynamism is reflected in orchestral works such as Partita (1995).
French influences Bennett celebrated his love for Debussy in a series of Syrinx-inspired chamber pieces in the 1980s, and Ravel’s lushly harmonised waltz idiom was often echoedin his music. In his film scores, Bennett had a penchant for the electronic timbre of the ondes martenot, which memorably captured the dreamy Mediterranean ambience of Enchanted April (1991).
Jazz Bennett’s singing voice was a suave baritone, with an American tinge and engagingly conversational style. After one of his cabaret-style jazz performances in 1970, Britten wrote to him: ‘It was extraordinary to hear those wild ’20s and ’30s harmonies really making sense, & you made a lot of that music sound really beautiful’.
Modernism The dissonant idiom with which he was initially associated later resurfaced in sometimes surprising contexts. Noctuary (1981), a set of variations for piano on a theme by Scott Joplin, departs from its tonal opening to climax in brutally atonal rhetoric, from which the original theme then eerily re-emerges.
