Composer | Sir Richard Rodney Bennet

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett was born in 1936 at Broadstairs in Kent. Coming from a musical family—his mother studied with Holst— he started composing when he was young and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in 1953, where he studied with Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson. Earlier informal training from Elizabeth Lutyens, however, had instilled in him a curiosity for the avant garde, and so thanks to a scholarship from the French Government, he went to study with Boulez for two years, as well as enjoying visits to Darmstadt.

Having assimilated Boulez’s musical language, Bennett then developed what has been termed “a neo-Romantic serialism,” which, perhaps like that of Berg, was ideally suited to opera. Indeed, Bennett composed no fewer than three full-length operas in the 60’s: The Mines of Sulphur, A Penny for a Song and Victory. There is also the hugely popular, much performed children’s opera, All the King’s Men. In the 60’s and 70’s Bennett also composed works in a wide range of other genres—there are the largescale works for choir and orchestra, Epithalamion and Spells, as well as three symphonies and concertos and/or concertante pieces for almost every instrument. Sir Richard Rodney Bennett lived in New York City from 1979 until his death in December 2012.