Hello, I'm Kristy Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1997 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. This week is a composer gifted and prolific his output includes not only Opera symphonies and concertos but the scores of more than 50 films including Far from the madding crowd, murder on the Orient Express and four weddings and a funeral. His childhood was repressed, he says, his education at the Royal Academy of Music rather lax, so he learned his craft in his 20s under the watchful eyes of pioneers such as...

As Pierre Boulez and Elizabeth Lutyens. He also enjoys performing jazz and has appeared regularly with some of the world's leading jazz singers. His music, he says, may not be memorable forever, but it does get through to the audiences. He is Richard Rodney Bennett, Mouthful in itself. Why so many names? Well, when I started in the business, there were various other people called Richard Bennett. I don't know where they went, but, um, so I used my middle name. There you are, but you could have stayed... Richard Bennett all the way. Yes, yes. But you are as I've described a Jack if not a master of so many musical trades. Is that quote of yours that I used accurate that what you need to do is communicate with audiences? I do. Some composers don't I think when you're when you're learning your craft when you're 20 years old You're too involved in technique and fashion and so on really to want to communicate with people

And then later on as I so to speak grew up I realized that I really wanted a to give music to the players which they would really want to play As opposed to going through agony playing it which a lot of players do with contemporary music But also to to bring pleasure sounds a bit soppy, but for people to enjoy What I was doing. I hate the idea of the modern music, the modern composer as somebody who tortures his audience and the players. Of course you also have that direct communication with audience when you perform with them. Play jazz. That's sheer enjoyment. --Yes, I found the merchant not performing. For many years, I and some of my contemporaries, composers like Peter Maxwell Davies and so on, performed a great deal because in the 50s and 60s when we were growing up musically, so little contemporary music was being played. And if we didn't play it, very few people would be. But the jazz performing or cabaret, whatever you like to call it, is a very very personal thing. It's your interpretation of the material. But it's also quite different of course because you've got to raise your eyes.

From the keyboard and you've got to look at the audience. Well that was when I started singing with Marian Montgomery. It was terribly hard and a friend of mine called Dan... Who was a classical tenor said look at the exit sign and it was a very good tip because people think you're looking at them. I can deal with it now but I'd prefer not to see people's faces. Do you? But when you then, after you'd performed as it were, if you ever played a classical piece was it difficult not to look at the audience? Yes, one had a terrible tendency to want to grin at them and talk to them and matter of fact when for example I do concerts

John Hall, the great saxophone player, we tend to talk to the audience about the pieces because it's welcoming them in. It's not just going on the stage sort of boot-faced and sitting down and playing and walking off again, which to me is very strange. Let me try out a theory of your professional existence on you. Tell me if it's right. The jazz and that performance is for kicks, sheer enjoyment. The film music you do, you enjoy it, but it also happens to make you a good amount of money. And both of those make it possible for you to do what you really want to do, which is... I want to say the jazz was for kicks. I mean that sounds like you know ho ho ho and to hear that It's very hard work, and I'm not exactly perfectionist, but I do work very hard to do it as well as possible But it is a great pleasure

And performing classical music was by no means always a pleasure, nor is writing film music, which can be agony. But what you really want to do is write serious music in this? I don't know what I want to do anymore, I'm having a little holiday. OK, you're on holiday to a desert island here, I'm afraid. Tell me about the first record you're going to play on it. Well, everything in that I've chosen is to do with friends of mine. I mean, I cannot choose...

The 10 greatest masterpieces of all time. I cannot. I want music, some music that I was involved in, but all performed in some way by friends of mine. First piece is John Harle, the great saxophone player, playing my theme, I'm sorry to say, from the television series Tender Is The Night. And this is where I met John on the recording session. I said, I want a great saxophone player. And there was this big guy looking like a football player who made the most exquisite sound.

John Harle playing the theme from the television adaptation of Tender is the Night composed by my castaway Richard Rodney Bennett with John Lenahan on piano. And of course you went on to write a saxophone concerto for Stan Getz didn't you? Yes I met Stan Getz at a party and I'd always idolized him and he... He needed a piece that he could get up and play with an orchestra as opposed to, you know, jazz with a small group. I did, and I also wrote a saxophone sonata for John Hall for the soprano saxophone, which he was playing on that cut. And I suppose it's probably the first soprano saxophone sonata, but why not? It's a beautiful instrument. And you've done what percussion can show. ...for evening Glennian guitar concerto for June... Yes, what I was saying about wanting to give music to players who needed it... They don't need another violin and guitar from anybody. - Tell me how you write the film music. What happens? Do you become part of the production team? 'Cause I mean, you've written for...

Been a big director, John Schlesinger, Boating, Ken Russell. - The film is well out of the way. I mean, it's all made generally by the time you come in. There's still sort of ditzing about with it and cutting bits. And so on. I try not to think about where I'm going to put music to begin with. I just try and assimilate it, you know, with the style and get a feeling for the color of the thing. For example, I just finished a film which I think is my best score and it's also for my favorite director who is John Schlesinger and it's a film It's Sweeney Todd with Ben Kingsley and Joanna Lumley and it's a marvelous film. You know, Sweeney Todd is pretty gory. The pies, right? And John Schlesinger, who's intensely musical, had laid as a temporary soundtrack, which many directors do, which is fine, a harpsichord concerto by Poulenc, which is very sort of rather prim and mysterious, and in the tinkling harpsichord, rather than bang-bang and scream.

And it was so brilliant because it made me realize how the music should work. Every film should work in a different way and be a different color, be a different instrumentation. It's not just, you're not just painting the walls pink, you know. Record number two. Tell me about it. All right. This is a wave towards somebody who is one of my idols, the Hollywood composer and jazz arranger Johnny Mandel. From a score he wrote for a very strange movie called Agatha with Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, and it was about the mysterious days when Agatha Christie disappeared and I think she had some sort of mental breakdown or something,

The title music from the soundtrack of the film. Composed and arranged by Johnny Mandel. You apparently started composing at the age of five Richard that was very precocious. Well you know I think composers don't actually start people say when did you write your first piece that's like asking a child when did you do your first drawing. You mess around you know your finger paint or whatever. Then gradually something comes out which looks like something. So you wrote notes on a page. Yes, and my mother had been a composer and was a very good pianist. And I used to pretend I was writing music by drawing dots and lines and giving them titles. I was much more into titles than the actual notes. What sort of titles? Well, I remember I wrote a piece, my first existing piece is from when I was about five, I suppose, and it's called From Neptune's Caverns.

I thought was the most lovely title possible. And it was all very romantic. And then gradually, gradually, I started actually to be able to write tunes down. So it was a slow process. - And you used to harmonize nursery rhymes. - I used to harmonize nursery rhymes. I was sent to the pictures quite a lot with one or other of my sisters to get me out of there and stop me playing the piano. Because I was always banging away and trying to play the water concerto or whatever it was. But your mother apparently thought you were too romantic. She sort of poured cold water on us. My mother was a rather inhibiting lady. But I started to hear music at the movies. I mean, Gershwin and, you know, music of 1940s musicals. And since I didn't really know the tunes, I used to try and harmonize nursery rhymes like popular tunes. It sounds a bit bizarre now, but it's true. And you listened to jazz? In those days, there wasn't that, this huge gulf between jazz and...

And pop music that there is now. And I mean, I remember Ella Fitzgerald, for example, having hit songs during the war. So there wasn't a great divide. - But again, your parents apparently poured cold water on this because they thought that listening to jazz on the radio was a bad habit you'd grow out of. - It wasn't quite right. And you must admit it's slightly odd for a little boy in the depths of Devonshire, not having been told that this was worth listening to, just being avidly listening. To Ella Fitzgerald or whatever on the radio. And what about your relationship with your father? He was... He was a rather shadowy figure. He was a writer of children's books, basically. Rodney Bennett. And he was not very strong. He had a heart condition. I was rather kept away from him. And later on when I went in, when I was living in America, and I went into therapy because I had to stop smoking.

And I suddenly realized that I resented terribly the fact that I didn't know him. And he used to beat us and it was it was not that happy really. -Badly? -No, but it leaves a memory which is not a happy one. -However at the age of 15 you were still writing music avidly and you wrote what was described. I buy one critic is a very respectable string quartet. And then at 16, you wrote a piece for soprano chorus and orchestra and you were on your way really. You got a scholarship I think, didn't you? - I thought my writing music then was so glamorous to me. It was just so thrilling, you know, and reading in encyclopedias and so on about whoever the composers were, you know, was so glamorous. It was like reading about film stars. And I got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, yes. Record number three well this turns up very well because my favorite English composer from a very early age was William Walton and I loved him he was

A very funny man, a very dry man, and we were very happy. You know, talking to one another, I remember laughing a lot. Yehudi Minuwins.

...playing part of the opening movement of William Walton's Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Walton. Now, Richard Rodney Bennett, you hold the International Chair of Composition at the Royal Academy these days, so... We have to be careful what I lead you into saying about it, but apparently back in 1953 you didn't It's a very different thing now. Back in those days it was very unprofessional, it was very conservative, it was very lax, the teaching. I think you used that word earlier. And I wanted a professional training. - You were interested in modern music as well and they didn't offer anything? - Well not really but we, I mean the best thing I did at the Academy was to start playing contemporary music with my friends in a little modern music society. - Was that approved of or not? - No. - I see. - Not at all. - But you'd become interested in it as I say, the music of Webern and Schoenberg and the 12 note technique. Can you explain what was, what is modern music? Around the turn of the century.

The whole system of keys, you know, things being in G major, C major, whatever, started to go out the window and it really, with... And Marlowe and so on, the whole tonality began to sort of shatter. And then all the wonderful things that were happening around the First World War in music with all the great 20th century music composers sort of growing up. System went out the window. And so Schoenberg came up with an idea that music should be reorganized in a slightly different way. Instead of having a piece being in C major, i.e. C is the most important note, that all notes should be equally important, and he devised the idea of using what he called a series, which was the notes of the chromatic scale being organised into a certain shape, which gave rise to all the music in the piece. And like a lot of very highly technical things, the results actually were not necessarily very attractive to beginners.

With and I really say that was feeling. They were atonal. Yes and yes because because because the floor so to speak had gone from under people's feet they didn't have firm ground to stand on. What was attractive about it for you then? So much music that I was interested in used that kind of technique and also the idea of taking a tiny thing i.e. an arrangement of notes and making our entire, if you like, symphony out of it was so marvelous. And who taught you to do that? Well, the big influence on my teenage years was an extraordinary lady Called Elizabeth Lutyens. And she was a very... I suppose you'd say, my mother would have said, a very bohemian lady. And she drank too much, and she smoked too much, and she cursed too much, and she had terrible troubles in her family, and she was an absolutely riveting glass.

Glamorous person to me and she was the pioneer of using this kind of technique in England. And why is there none of it on your list of eight records here? Because it's basically not music I necessarily listen to for pleasure. So why did you want to write it then? You must have listened to it for pleasure then. I don't know about... - Opposed pleasure, yes, certainly. But one's taste-- - So it was a technical exercise, then, was it? - One's taste changed. I mean, imagine if I'd been an abstract painter in the early '60s, and over the years, I'd gradually come to admit representational ideas into my painting. It's not that I'm betraying the original thing, it's just that one needs and one's creating. I put changes over the years, but I wouldn't have been able to to write with a the Fluency, I write now, if I hadn't been through a very strict technical discipline in my early years... And you put a lot of that down to Pierre Boulez.

Pierre Boulez was my, my, well, one time I guess my mentor, and I studied with him in Paris when I was 2021, and he was the first musician I'd ever met who really shook me, who really scared me. He really took you apart, you said. He really took me apart. In what way? What did you do? Because I'd been writing since I was five or six. I was immensely fluent. I'd started doing movies when I was 19. I could write in all kinds of styles, and this did, none of this impressed him in the slightest degree, rather the opposite I think. He gave me a very tough training, and I was very grateful to him, and I always have been. Record number four. It's always a joy meeting young musicians of enormous talent, and I have two of them in this program. And somebody I've met recently is a young American pianist, I guess 30, 31, called Bill Sharnapp. And he, to me, is a great jazz pianist. And he loves tunes.

Like, I love tunes. I mean tunes from the great American musicals and so on. And on this track he's playing a tune from Brigadoon called The Heather on the Hill. Bill Charlotte playing the Heather on the Hill from Brigadoon. So Richard you did music for feature films, you'd already done I think three before you were 21, so you'd established an income and then when you were 24.

You were commissioned to write a one-act opera for Sadler's Wells. Was that a big breakthrough for you? Yes, it was. I'd always loved singers. And even as a child, I used to accompany one of my sisters who was studying singing. And I always loved poetry. I guess through my father. And so when I had a commission to write a one-act opera, it wasn't that enormous a step, but it took me onto a scale of writing, which I'd never attempted before, even though Opera was only half an hour. But this was modern music, this was serialism? Yes, yes, this was this was a contemporary style of writing and I worked with a writer who later became very famous called Adrian Mitchell and we did a story that was to do with somebody thinking about suicide and top for a high building. The ledge, it was called? The ledge and because I wanted somebody in some extreme of emotion. And it was very exciting. And I think perhaps now, I haven't heard it for so many years.

But it did lead to various other things and I did write three other operas. Well you wrote the Minds of Salford. The Minds of Salford was very important to me. And then after that came your first and second symphonies and your first piano. This was all during the 60s and at the same time I think you were releasing soundtracks weren't you of your film music? Oh yes, a bit, yes. A billion dollar brain. Billion dollar brain. Soft man in crime. Quite a number. The 60s as they say in London. Know where it was at but you seem to have had a bad time with the press and in the end you went didn't you left us oh that's a very compressed version of story you know in this country if you do have a big success there always comes a

For it. And in 1979, for a whole lot of reasons, I moved to live in New York. Some personal reasons, some professional reasons. I wanted to have more time free to write. I wanted to stop teaching and performing so much. I wanted to stop sitting on committees and so on, which you do if you're in the profession. And I moved to New York, which I'd always loved and I've been very happy there ever since. Next piece of music. OK, all my life I've worked with singers and I think I have a vocation as, if you like, an accompanist. And I've had many partnerships with singers, both classical and jazz influenced. And the one, the partnership I'm involved in now, which I think is the best partnership I've ever had, is with the American singer Mary-Claire Heron.

Your sweet expression, the smile you gave me The way you looked when we met It's easy to remember Merry Christmas. Claire Harron singing Lawrence Hart's song Easy to Remember from Mississippi. That was arranged and played by my castaway Richard Rodney Bennett. You said just now that you had a vocation as an accompanist, but at the same time, at some point, you came through from that, didn't you? You stopped doing that and you started to perform yourself directly and not just accompany. Yes. I'd always loved lyrics and I should have said earlier that my father in addition to writing children's books wrote some of the most famous

drawing and ballad lyrics of the 20s with composers like Eric Coates. So I always knew about song lyrics. Income in jazz, particularly if you're a pianist, you don't have to have a great voice to put over. These kind of songs. I mean... Are you saying you don't have a great voice? Well, I don't. I mean, I don't have a technical great voice, but I do have a voice that will convince listeners of the emotions that I'm expressing. Just again, it's this message. Isn't it? I think again you've said it's sort of like whispering someone's ear if the lyrics... I love singing, singing lyrics. I really do. But I get the impression that, that, you know, you played all that down, your liking for jazz and, and perhaps liking the kind of performances we've been talking about. It was a very private thing for you for quite a long time. Were you afraid that the classicists wouldn't take you seriously? Slightly.

But then when I went into films when I was 20 or whatever, there was a certain amount of sniffy behaviour. I mean, people sort of forgot, I suppose, that William Walton and Benjamin Franklin... Britain and Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland and Arnold Backs and all kinds of English composers had done serious film scores. And also when I, as it were, came out as a jazz pianist, although I'd always done it, there was a... it's their problem, it's not my problem. But you had to be older and... Yes, yes, and basically as I said much earlier in this program. I've never cared much I've just gone ahead and done the things I believed in record number six a few years ago I went up to Glasgow because I was going to be in a concert series up there And I went to look at the hall and there was a girl singing there that night And as soon as she walked onto the stage I said to my friend who I was with that is a star and her name was Claire Martin, and she's a dynamite girl and of great intelligence

With a wonderful voice, terrific jazz sense. And on this track, she's actually singing a song by another friend of mine called Blossom Deary, who is a great jazz singer. Bye bye country boy Claire Martin and Bye Bye Country Boy, written by Blossom Deary and Jack Seacrest. So how do you do it Richard Wright music you're in this part... In New York sitting there you sitting at a piano or you sitting I'm sitting here piano I don't wonder

I do not do is just fiddle about on the piano until something comes out through my fingers. That is not composition, that's just messing, improvising or messing about or whatever. But I like to have a piano when I'm writing just to sort of perform the music to myself and see how it feels. I mean I can, I can read music like I'm reading this sheet of paper in front of me with all the details of my writing.

But it's not the same as, so to speak, having it read out by an actor. But you can look at that sheet of paper and hear it in your head. Oh yes, I can, yes, technically, I mean, of course. And are you frightened? Are you worried? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Yes, if I'm doing a commercial score, I mean, there's no time to sit around and thinking, and think, oh my God, I can't do it this time. And you just have to plunge in. But if I'm writing, if I had to sit down tomorrow and start writing a symphony, I would be in state like I'd never written music before in my life. But you've also said that, you know, it is a kind of practical process, a technical process, it's not, and I quote you, a flood of God-given inspiration. Heavens no. I mean, I've been a professional composer for some 40 years, and heaven help me if I'd sit down.

Around and waited for a divine light to come down from the sky. It's technique, it's a lot of imagination, lots of technique and a great deal of hard work and every now and again an idea comes along and you think that is brilliant, that's what I've been waiting for. One of the nicest things I think about, quote, succeeding in one's profession is you get to be friends with people you admire enormously. And early in this programme I played a soundtrack thing from Johnny Mandel, who's one of my idols. And the next one is the greatest French horn player in the world, Barry Tuckwell, and he's playing a beautiful tune... Early Jerome Cohen tune from 1917 called Till the Clouds Roll By, which had a lyric by P.G. Woodhouse, and it also involves a tune called Look for the Silver Lining.

Barry Tuckwell playing till the clouds roll by. Written by Jerome Kern and arranged by Richard Rodney Bennett. Richard, you're 61, you're rich, you're successful... - You know I'm rich. - Well, you must be. You live in New York, you've lived there for 17 years, very chic on the Upper West Side. Is that where you belong now or will you come back home one day? I wouldn't live anywhere else. Really? Why? Because I think it's a very nice part of New York. It's a city that I love.

Friends there. I have a kind of nice social life. I mean just playing cards and going out to dinner and so... - So you play cards, what do you play with them? - Poker. - Poker, play poker with them. You cook for them? - I love to cook. I'm sort of becoming quite a good cook, not a fancy cook, not a snob cook. I hate that kind of food but I do, I do love having people over to my house. - So you're quite domestic by nature really. So this desert island's not going to pose any practical problems? - No. - But socially you are going to be devastated. Yes, yes. Hmm. Will you go quietly mad? No, no. Not at all. I'm very resourceful. This is one legacy of my upbringing. I've always entertained myself and sometimes it's involved, you know, playing with crafts, books, cooking, anything. I'm good at living on my own, I like it. Last record. Um...

Again, one of my idols, Shirley Horn, one of the greatest, even if she's still a secret, one of the best regarded, best loved jazz artists of all. ♪ In the cold, light air ♪ One enormous chair... Oh wouldn't it be lovely Shirley Horne and Wouldn't It Be Lovely it's going to be very romantic And really rather sexy on your island. Rather sexy on my island, yes. Nothing atonal about it, is there? No, no. No, no.

- How about if you could only take one of them? - That's a terrible question. I think it would be, I'm madly looking at the list, I think it would be the Violin Concerto of William Walton, 'cause we only played a teeny bit of it, and it's a major work that goes on forever, and I've known it, well not forever, for a long time. I've known it since I was a child and I still love it. What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare? This is difficult. I read a great deal. I devour books and I re-read them. But I do find reading poetry, which I've always done, and setting poetry, of course, to music, I don't take it all in the first place. So I love anthologies of poetry because I can go back to them and every time I find out more and things I didn't understand the first time, suddenly they're speaking to you. And my favourite anthologist, from whom I've learned a very great deal of poetry, is Edith Zitwell. And my favourite anthology of hers is the Atlantic book, A British and American.

Poetry and a lot of my texts that I've set have come from that and even though it's in two volumes I'll tie it up very tightly And your luxury well I Thought about this a lot. I can do all kinds of hand crafts and I can knit. I'm a very good knitter I just taught myself for something to do in front of the television and I want a six millimeter 36 inch circular needle that's to say with a point at both ends and so I can knit myself sweaters from palm trees and stuff a Fronded sweater Richard Rodney Bennett, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island disc. I love it, thank you. You've been listening to a podcast. You've been listening to a podcast. You've been listening to a podcast. From the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.