Richard Rodney Bennett - Orchestral Works, Vol. 4 (John Wilson)

Information

Composer: Richard Rodney Bennett

• (01) Troubadour Music
• (02) Piano Concerto
• (06) Aubade
• (07) Country Dances (Book 1)
• (12) Anniversaries

Michael McHale, piano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
John Wilson, conductor

Date: 2020
Label: Chandos
https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%205244

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Review

I love the analogy Richard Rodney Bennett made when describing his multifaceted career as ‘different rooms, albeit in the same house’ – adding almost as a throwaway that he might have (unceremoniously) knocked down some of the walls between them. Vol 4 of this marvellous John Wilson retrospective reinforces once again just how well the open-plan approach works. Bennett – child of Boulez, refugee from the hardcore avant-garde – grew to embrace musical diversity of a Bernsteinian relish, and as this series unfolds, the inevitability of his journey becomes ever clearer. As always, the technique and composerly gamesmanship of his pieces consistently dazzles.

Troubadour Music is a ‘flourish’ for John Mauceri’s final Hollywood Bowl season in 2006 – a 13th-century minstrel song all gussied up and strutting its stuff beneath the stars of La-La Land. Worlds away from his 1968 Piano Concerto, which Stephen Kovacevich premiered in that year and which sets aside the traditional protagonistic and antagonistic role of the soloist in favour of a journeyman figure, an almost obbligato presence in an ever-shifting orchestral landscape. It’s an enticing piece full of textural allure and a solo part awash with virtuoso glitz and shimmer – beautifully taken here by Michael McHale, whose limpid fingerwork is possessed of a crystalline light-catching brilliance.

In each of these collections there has been something that has caught my ear for the first time and become a constant companion. Aubade is that piece here, commissioned for the 1964 Proms and offered in tribute to the conductor John Hollingsworth – an early champion of Bennett’s – who had died prematurely the year before. This morning song turned mourning song is another gorgeous specimen from the late-romantic hothouse, conveying a distinctly Bergian sensibility right through to the oscillating woodwinds that are so suggestive of the closing moments of Wozzeck.

Bennett’s Country Dances (2001) evolved from an archaic source (an anthology of folk dances written between 1651 and 1728), an enthusiasm from the past reimagined for the present and exercising Bennett’s enviable facility for making all his choices of instrumentation sound so natural as not to appear to be choices at all. ‘New Dance’ is wonderfully verdant, straight out of Thomas Hardy country, where it evokes a mood Bennett captured so gloriously in his movie score for Far From the Madding Crowd.

Anniversaries is his 1982 commission for the 60th-anniversary celebrations of the BBC and effectively a concerto for orchestra with a starring prominence given to the percussion section, the engine of the work’s episodic design. Above all, though, it’s another great example of how effortlessly (or so it seems) Bennett spins and develops ideas while wielding the largest of orchestras. And really all one can ask of performers – and John Wilson and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra deliver in spades – is a precision and virtuosity for music that sounds like it’s evolving in the playing of it. Keep it coming.

-- Edward Seckerson, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2020/May/Bennett_orchestral_v4_CHSA5244.htm
https://www.allmusic.com/album/sir-richard-rodney-bennett-vol-4-mw0003369406

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Richard Rodney Bennett (29 March 1936 – 24 December 2012) was an English composer of film, TV and concert music, and also a jazz pianist and occasional vocalist. Bennett studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew, spent two years in Paris as a student Pierre Boulez. He was International Chair of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music between 1994 and the year 2000. Bennett wrote in a wide range of styles, producing over 200 works for the concert hall, and 50 scores for film and television. He was also a writer and performer of jazz songs for 50 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rodney_Bennett

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John Wilson (born 1972 in Gateshead, Tyne & Wear) is a British conductor, arranger and musicologist who conducts orchestras and operas, as well as big band jazz. He studied music at A-level at Newcastle College, and later attended the Royal College of Music, first as a percussionist, and later studying composition and conducting. Wilson is the creator of the John Wilson Orchestra (formed in 1994) and has been Associate Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra since September 2016. He has made numerous recordings, both with his own orchestra and as guest conductor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilson_(conductor)
https://johnwilsonconductor.com/

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