During his lifetime, the English composer Richard Rodney Bennett was regarded rather snobbishly as too “facile” – a criticism also directed at the young Benjamin Britten 30 years earlier. Following study with Pierre Boulez, Bennett’s first orchestral scores were starkly modernist, such as the First Symphony, written when he was 21 and utilising 12-tone themes. His Piano Concerto of 1968, composed for Stephen Kovacevich, is similarly tough. 

But Bennett also wrote film scores (Murder on the Orient Express and Four Weddings and a Funeral are two), and began working in cabaret, singing and accompanying the English cabaret artists Marian Montgomery and Claire Martin. In October 1979, Bennett moved from the UK to New York, where he remained. Eventually, his early avant-garde influences no longer interested him, and his music grew more populist and tonal. Right throughout his career, however, Bennett wrote music specifically to be heard and enjoyed. He was a consummate professional, an expert orchestrator, and his musical ideas were always fresh and involving.

This program consists of three works from 1973 to 1989,...