Bennett Piano Concerto Commedia IV Five Studies Capriccio

SRCD.275 STEREO ADD Richard Rodney RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT (b.1936) Piano Concerto Piano Concerto (1968) * (24’19”) 1 1st Movement: Moderato (8’35”) 2 2nd Movement: Presto (4’11”) tt 3 4 e Commedia IV 3rd Movement: Lento (6’41”) 4th Movement: Vivo (4’52”) Benn Five Studies for Piano (1962-4) ** (10’29”) 5 1 Flessibile (2’31”) 6 2 Presto, mano destra (1’30”) Five Studies 7 3 Agitato (1’09”) 8 4 Recitando, mano sinistra (2’33”) 9 5 Appassionato (2’46”) 10 Capriccio for Piano Duet (1968) *** (6’50”) Capriccio 11 Commedia IV (2 trumpets, horn, trombone & tuba) (1973) **** (13’45”) (55’28”) * Stephen Kovacevich, piano London Symphony Orchestra (led by John Brown) conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson ** Richard Rodney Bennett, piano *** Richard Rodney Bennett & Thea Musgrave, piano **** Philip Jones Brass Ensemble Philip Jones, trumpet • Elgar Howart, trumpet Ifor James, horn • John Iveson, trombone • John Fletcher, tuba The above individual timings will normally each include two pauses. One before the beginning of each movement or work, and one after the end. * ** *** ൿ 1972 **** ൿ 1975 The copyright in these sound recordings is owned by Lyrita Recorded Edition, England Stephen Kovacevich Thea Musgrave This compilation and digital remastering ൿ 2007 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England © 2007 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Made in the UK Richard Rodney Bennett Philip Jones Brass Ensemble LYRITA RECORDED EDITION. Produced under an exclusive license from Lyrita by Wyastone Estate Ltd, PO Box 87, Monmouth, NP25 3WX, UK London Symphony Orchestra Sir Alexander Gibson ne of the most versatile musicians of his generation, Richard Rodney Bennett Ohas been in the forefront of British composers for nearly half a century. His original compositions include numerous orchestral works, chamber, choral and piano works, ballets, songs, madrigals, jazz pieces and many award-winning film scores and music for television, from Far From the Madding Crowd, Billion Dollar Brain and Murder on the Orient Express to Four Weddings and a Funeral, Doctor Who and Titus Groan. He has appeared as a soloist in piano concertos, classical recitals, and as accompanist to well-known jazz and cabaret artists in numbers by Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and many other popular composers. www.lyrita.co.uk Bennett was born on 29 March 1936 into a musical family in Broadstairs, on the Kent coast, and began composing as a child. His mother, who had been a Notes © 2007 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England student of Gustav Holst at St Paul’s Girls’ School, began teaching him piano from Cover: Photograph of the composer courtesy of the Lewis Foreman collection. the age of five. In 1953 a scholarship took him to the Royal Academy of Music in Photograph of mask from istockphoto.com London, where he studied with Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson. He has Original recordings made in association with the BRITISH COUNCIL been described as ‘the most spectacular rising star on the British musical scene in the Fifties’. By the end of his first year he had written his first three string quartets, Five Studies & Capriccio which were enthusiastically reviewed by London critics for their natural and Rec ording location and date: September 1971, Kingsway Hall, London Recording Producer: Michael Bremner convincingly expressive use of the 12-note method. And Bennett was still a RAM Recording Engineer: Stanley Goodall student when he met the film conductor John Hollingsworth, who gave him his first opportunities to write film soundtracks, starting with small-scale scores for Piano Concerto industrial documentaries. (One of his first successful orchestral works, Aubade, was Rec ording location and date: 12-13 January 1971, Wembley Town Hall. Recording Producer & Engineer: Jaap van Ginneken written in Hollingsworth’s memory.) At the same time he was studying informally with the pioneering British serial Commedia IV composer Elisabeth Lutyens, who aroused an interest in more avant-garde Rec ording location and date: December 1974, Decca Studio No.3, West Hampstead, London Recording Producer: Michael Bremner techniques and idioms which led him to visit the Darmstadt summer schools. In Recording Engineer: Stanley Goodall 1958 a French government grant led Bennett to Paris, where he underwent two years’ intensive tuition from Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen. They represented Digital Remastering Engineer: Simon Gibson a radically different aesthetic from his R.A.M. teachers, and he continued his absorption, begun with Lutyens, of the then-exciting tenets of post-Webernian WARNING Copyright subsists in all Lyrita Recordings. Any unauthorised broadcasting. public performance, copying, rental or re-recording thereof in any manner whatsoever will constitute an serialism. At the same time however he was establishing himself as a successful jazz infringement of such copyright. In the United Kingdom licences for the use of recordings for public pianist. He also formed a 2-piano duo with his RAM classmate and friend Susan performance may be obtained from Phonographic Performance Ltd., 1 Upper James Street, London, W1F 9DE 2 7 Bennett’s Capriccio fo r piano duet, composed for the composer and his friend Bradshaw, and they performed widely together for over 20 years. Other regular Susan Bradshaw to perform, is closely contemporary with the Piano Concerto but, performing partners have been the soprano Jane Manning and the horn-player despite its title, is a tautly-argued and rather challenging work which shows Barry Tuckwell. Bennett’s mastery of serial technique at its most cogent. Rapid figurations, often in On his return to London, Bennett’s unusual mixture of modernist rigour, contrary motion, are contrasted against hammered, almost Stravinskian repeated- lyrical warmth and first-rate craftsmanship soon garnered him significant chord figures, creating an exhilarating but absolutely serious virtuoso vehicle for commissions and laid the ground for international success. He received the Arnold the two players. Bax Society Prize in 1964 and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Award for Composer of The series of four chamber works that Bennett wrote in 1972-73 and entitled the Year in 1965. Both by generation and by his partiality for 12-note serial Commedia I-IV are among his most characteristic and effective creations. techniques Bennett tended to be grouped with the so-called ‘Manchester School’ of Schematic in ground-plan but dramatic in approach, and originally based (in Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Nicholas Maw and Commedia I) on the idea of interacting characters from the Commedia dell’arte, others who came to prominence as Britain’s first significant post-war musical the form of each of them is like a mosaic, consisting of a number of short avant-garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But Bennett’s interests and theirs at interrelated sections. The instruments, so to speak, fulfil the roles of actors in a play, most occasionally coincided: he was set upon a different creative path, as his highly coming together as an ensemble in ‘scenes’ but also being grouped in smaller units successful jazz ballet of 1963, Jazz Calendar, showed: the first of a string of jazz- and configurations. oriented works which take in music written for specific performers such as Cleo Commedia IV (1973), for a brass quintet (two trumpets, horn, trombone and Laine and stretch at least as far as the Concerto for Stan Getz of 1990. But his most tuba) was commissioned by the Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for the Philip Jones significant major works of the 1960s and 1970s included three operas: The Mines of Brass Ensemble, who gave the first performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 27 Sulphur and A Penny for a Song for Sadler’s Wells, and Victory for the Royal Opera April 1974. In this highly effective work – it has been described as one of the best House, Covent Garden. (There was also a highly successful children’s opera, All the works ever written for brass quintet – six ‘ensemble’ passages for the full quintet King’s Men.) These were followed by the full-length ballet Isadora, premiered by frame five groups of solos, duets and trios. The form of the entire piece is the Royal Ballet in 1981. symmetrically constructed around a central solo for the horn. Considerable By this time Bennett had become increasingly acclimatized to life in the USA. virtuosity is required from every player as the music encompasses the full range of He was composer-in-residence at the Peabody Institute, Baltimore in 1969-71 and each instrument and a wide variety of playing techniques. Starting and finishing in regularly appeared as a soloist at jazz clubs in New York and elsewhere. In 1979 bouncy, lively fashion, Commedia IV traverses a wide range of expression. The Bennett moved to New York, which remains his home. He has toured the USA as mosaic-like construction may remind us of a great ancestor – Stravinsky’s an accompanist (for example with the singer Marian Montgomery) and appeared Symphonies of Wind Instruments – and like the Stravinsky Bennett’s comedy there many times in his own works. But he has kept his British citizenship and is a eventually stumbles on sonorous chorales for the full ensemble. But whereas in frequent visitor to his native country. He was awarded the CBE in 1977, and was Stravinsky these occur at the end, Bennett’s chorales are located near his work’s knighted in 1998. centre, and from their comparative gravity and quality of reflection the music One of his most successful and enduring large-scale works, Bennett’s Piano gradually recovers its élan and wit, capering at last to a decisive and emphatic Concerto wa s composed in 1967-68. (It was then referred to, and has often been conclusion. CALUM MACDONALD 6 3 described since, as ‘Piano Concerto No.1’, but there has been no successor.) The and generating an increasingly ebullient mood.

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