Few composers of our time have crossed musical boundaries with such consummate ease as Richard Rodney Bennett. A creative life that began with serial composition, though never in a hardline, dogmatic way (even though Bennett studied with Pierre Boulez in Paris in the late 1950s) went on to include an impressive list of scores for Hollywood movies, as well as a parallel career as a jazz pianist, accompanist and cabaret crooner.
Bennett died on Christmas Eve four years ago, and the first of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion events this season was devoted to his music, in what would have been the year of his 80th birthday. It must have been a challenge to encapsulate such a wonderfully various musical achievement in a single day, but this was a fine attempt. It began in the morning with a screening of Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express, for which Bennett supplied the score in 1974, went on to chamber music from Guildhall School students, a programme of occasional pieces and songs from the BBC Concert Orchestra and foyer jazz from one of Bennett’s regular collaborators, the singer Claire Martin, before the BBCSO itself drew all the threads together in a final concert under Rumon Gamba.
That provided the most substantial works of the day – four of them from the 1970s and 80s, when Bennett was composing both for concert hall and cinema. Perhaps as a result of this collision of musical worlds, the edges of his language were beginning to soften, and the severity of his serial works was left behind. Though the fluency and transparency of the orchestral writing was always obvious, it would be wrong to claim that everything in the concert was equally convincing. Despite its gorgeous main theme, the Elegy for Viola and Orchestra, which Bennett extracted from his score for Robert Bolt’s film Lady Caroline Lamb in 1972, is a bit of a cut-and-paste potboiler, which all the eloquence of the soloist Lawrence Power could not disguise, while Anniversaries, written for the 60th birthday of the BBC in 1982, is a set of theme and variations that puts the orchestra through its paces in a brilliant but slightly glib way.
It was wonderful, though, to hear Gamba’s intense performances of Bennett’s searching Third Symphony from 1987, in which the balance between tonality and chromatic lyricism seems exactly right, and especially the choral work Spells of 1975, six settings of poems by Kathleen Raine for soprano (Allison Bell) and chorus (the BBC Symphony Chorus). It’s a beautifully constructed sequence that moves steadily in its choice of poems from the universal to the personal, with spiralling soprano lines and choral writing that never lapses into the lingua franca of 20th-century British choral music. At times it suggests an unlikely fusion between Britten and Boulez, but Bennett was always identifiably himself, whatever he did.
• First part available on BBC iPlayer until 27 December, second part to be made available through the BBCSO’s website.
