Richard Roney Bennett

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[edit] 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 and Lennox Berkeley. 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 arch-serialist Pierre Boulez.
Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music between 1963 and 1965, and 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.[1]
He was the tutor of the celebrated composer Grayston Ives.
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.
In 1995, to celebrate its 200th issue, Gay Times magazine published list of people regarded as important to the British lesbian and gay community. Bennett was named as one of the key musical figures on the list.[2]

[edit] Music
Despite his early studies in modernist techniques, Bennett's tastes are catholic, and he has written in a wide range of styles, being particularly fond of jazz. Early on, he found success by writing music for feature films, although he considered this to be subordinate to his concert music. Nevertheless, he has continued to write music for films and television; among his scores are the Doctor Who story The Aztecs (1964), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, Murder on the Orient Express (1974), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won a BAFTA, 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.

[edit] Selected works

[edit] Instrumental works
Impromptus (for guitar) (1968)
Concerto for alto saxophone
Concerto for Stan Getz (ten sax, timpani & strings)
Elegy for Davis
A Little Suite, based on selections from his song cycles The Insect World and The Aviary.
Farnham Festival Overture (1964) for orchestra
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

[edit] Operas