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A guide to Richard Rodney Bennett's music

This week, Tom Service looks at a man who composes and performs across a range of musical
genres and yet has found an unmistakable and personal voice
Tom Service
Monday 2 July 2012 14.32BST

He's the British composer who has among the closest links to the European avant garde
in its postwar pomp, who gave the first British performance of Pierre Boulez's epochdefining Structures 1a for two pianos while still a student (along with his fellow
compositional traveller at the Royal Academy of Music, Cornelius Cardew). He is one of
the very few to have studied personally with Boulez in the 1950s. He has written concert
works, operas, and choral music, as well as becoming a brilliant and celebrated film
composer. Oh, and he is also one of the most gifted jazz pianists and singers of his or
any generation.
I could only be talking about the astonishing polymath 76-year-old Richard Rodney
Bennett. On the face of it, Bennett's compositional career looks like a turning away from
the strictures and structures of the avant garde in his earlier music towards an embracing
of a more conventional kind of tonality, lyricism and melody in his recent work. That
change was inspired partly by his experiences in the film studio, where he has written
scores for movies from Murder on the Orient Express including a vibrant, vital,
Rachmaninov- and Ravel-infused waltz that's still one of his most memorable melodies
to Four Weddings and a Funeral. But have a listen to the opening of his 1968 Piano
Concerto, composed for Stephen Kovacevich, or his Guitar Concerto from a couple of
years later, written for Julian Bream, and compare those to the sheer unbridled
tunefulness of his 1995 Partita for orchestra, and you might think you're listening to
music by completely different composers.
But Bennett's music is much more interconnected than it first seems. Let's just
remember what he did in the 1950s and 60s to promote the furthest reaches of the avant
garde in what was still the conservative confines of the postwar scene in the UK. A
talented pianist he had grown up playing tunes by memory from the films he saw as a
child he became fascinated by the force of imagination and the hard-edged glamour of
contemporary music from Europe, and he immersed himself in everything he could get
his hands and his ears around. He travelled to the Darmstadt summer courses, the
fountainhead of the musical far reaches in the 1950s, and also spent those extraordinary
years with Boulez in Paris. It was an experience that simultaneously showed Bennett the
expressive possibilities of the language Boulez was developing, above all in Le marteau
Sans Matre, and its limitations. Bennett remembers talking to Boulez excitedly about a
performance he'd heard of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe: Boulez's response was that
Ravel's masterpiece was an unconscionable piece of empty pederastic sensuality (an
opinion he has now completely reversed). Bennett could not agree, and while he
admired Boulez's musical and personal asceticism, he couldn't completely go along with
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either.
Yet for Bennett, this wasn't a rejection of everything that Boulez's revolution
represented. (Far from it: with his friend and co-Boulezian Susan Bradshaw, Bennett
translated Boulez on Music Today into English in 1971.) It was just that he needed to
find a way to include the rest of his musical loves in his own work. You can hear his
expressive accommodation with serialism and an emerging lyricism in his 1965 opera,
The Mines of Sulphur, and in the set of pieces he called Commedia; the same is true of
the grand opera he wrote for Covent Garden, Victory, performed in 1970.
In 1990, Bennett found a way of fusing jazz idioms in a classical context in a concerto he
wrote for saxophonist Stan Getz (who died, sadly, before he could perform it). The piece
isn't about a Third-Stream kind of blend of improvisation and classical conventions;
instead, as Susan Bradshaw wrote about the piece, it's about putting "jazz harmonies in
conjunction with the composer's own free-flowing serial technique". It's a work whose
tensile rigour and utterly compelling musical momentum couldn't have happened
without Bennett's structural thinking, but that also sings and stomps with expressive
and stylistic freedom.
The flowering of Bennett's melodic and harmonic language in his recent songs and
choral music, and in the Partita, I find pretty well irresistible: see what you think!
Bennett is living proof that the 20th and 21st century's stylistic extremes are not
mutually exclusive, that serialism and lyricism can not only co-exist but are dependent
on each other; that it's possible simultaneously to compose film scores and post-12-tone
symphonies, and that there need be no division between singing cabaret songs and
writing concertos. Bennett's prodigious musicality has meant, I think, that his work has
been undervalued. It shouldn't be. In his reflection of so many of the streams, trends and
styles of postwar music, and in the unmistakable, personal voice he has found across all
of the genres in which he has worked, composed and performed, Bennett is one of the
most significant compositional voices we have.

Five key links

Concerto for Stan Getz
Guitar Concerto
Murder on the Orient Express
Five Studies for piano, performed by Shura Cherkassky
A Garland for Marjory Fleming
Next week: Kaija Saariaho
More blogposts

Topics
Richard Rodney Bennett
Classical music
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