LIVE on Wedn the 3rd July - music of Richard Rodney Bennett

[salymap]

From Salford, the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Wilson.

Not your last concert or your next concert for which you have tickets.

LIVE on R 3 last night.

Details in RT or newspaper - did anybody listen.?

I enjoyed what I heard of it.

Richard Rodney Bennett died last December.Forgotten already ?

[Serial_Apologist]

I respect the guy, but he was at his best when he still composed serial music (eg "Voices"), and before he had the idea of a reproduction "musique d'ameublement" (apols to Satie) and taking up "jazz" singing, ahem.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I respect the guy

but he was at his best when he still composed serial music (eg "Voices")

[french frank]

The BBC broadcast the Glimmerglass production of The Mines of Sulphur some while ago (Aug 2005?). I found that quite interesting.

Aug 2004.

[Andrew Slater]

From Salford, the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Wilson.


LIVE on R 3 last night.

Details in RT or newspaper - did anybody listen.?

I enjoyed what I heard of it.

Richard Rodney Bennett died last December.Forgotten already ?

I was there. A bit of a mixed bag. I have heard some of the pieces before, but not the Reflections on a 16th Century Tune, which I found quite interesting: must listen again. The jazz songs, although demonstrating the variety of the composer's output, seemed to be out-of-place, but some of the audience (the studio was completely full) seemed to enjoy them more than some of the other pieces.

[bluestateprommer]

I respect the guy, but he was at his best when he still composed serial music (eg "Voices":loveblush......

SA actually touched on part of the problem with this particular concert, where one can clearly lay the blame at the feet of the conductor. It's not that JW did a bad job, as he did as well as he's done before with various all-British concerts that I've heard him conduct on R3, namely a solid job, if not scaling the heights. Where I apportion "blame" is his bias in his choice of RRB pieces, where JW chose only the milder and more populist sides of RRB, totally avoiding his serial-inspired works following his time studying with Boulez. JW claimed that he wanted to give as full a tribute to RRB as he could in this concert, but his choice of works was not the whole picture, far from it. I still remember his cheap jibe at William Glock some months back in the one concert with York Bowen and others, and his selection of RRB works here is a clear manifestation of the attitude behind that jibe, IMHO.

Having said that, the two major works for orchestra alone, "Reflections on a Sixteenth Century Tune" and the "Partita for Orchestra", came off very well, and JW did a fine job leading those. I didn't care much for the Marimba Concerto, as it seemed like quite a bit of harmonically middle-of-the-road doodling, although James Larter did what he could with it. I was actually fine with hearing a selection of RRB's jazz-inflected songs, which Claire Martin delivered well. Given her long musical relationship with RRB, one can only imagine how she was feeling as she sang.