Richard Rodney Bennett

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 1997

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer and performer Richard Rodney Bennett. A versatile musician, he is equally at home playing jazz, writing film scores or composing for the concert hall. He wants to give performers music which they want to play, so he has written percussion pieces for Evelyn Glennie and saxophone sonatas for John Harle and Stan Getz. "Nobody," he says, "needs another violin concerto from anybody". His film scores include Murder on the Orient Express, Far From the Madding Crowd and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but he confesses to having most fun when he's just singing jazz.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Violin Concerto by William Walton Book: The Atlantic book of British and American Poetry by Edith Sitwell Luxury: 6mm 36 inch circular knitting needle with a point at each end

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a composer, gifted and prolific, his output includes not only
0:35.2	opera, symphonies and concertos, but the scores of more than 50 films, including
0:39.8	far from the Mading crowd, murder on the Orient Express and four weddings and a funeral.
0:44.9	His childhood was repressed, he says.
0:47.0	His education at the Royal Academy of Music rather lax, so he learned his craft in his
0:52.0	twenties under the watchful eyes of pioneers such as Pierre
0:55.4	Boules and Elizabeth Lutians. He also enjoys performing jazz and has appeared regularly
1:01.0	with some of the world's leading jazz singers.
1:03.0	His music, he says, may not be memorable forever, but it does get through to the audiences.
1:09.0	He is Richard Rodney Bennett, which is quite a mouthful in itself.
1:13.0	Why so many names?
1:15.0	Well, when I started in the business, there were various other people called Richard
1:17.7	Bennett.
1:18.7	I don't know where they went, but, um, so I used my middle name.
1:21.3	There you are, but you could stayed Richard Bennett all the way.
1:23.7	Yes, yes.
1:24.7	But you are, as I've described a jack, if not a master, of so many musical trades.
1:29.4	Is that quote of yours that I used accurate, that what you need to do is communicate with audiences?
1:35.0	I do. Some composers don't.
1:37.0	I think when you're learning your craft, when you're 20 years old,
	...

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