The Bennett Bash

Not since the heyday of the madrigalists four centuries ago has England seethed with so much native musical creativity as it does today. The British renaissance, which began half a century ago with Elgar and Vaughan Williams and continued with Walton and Britten, is currently upheld by a coterie of younger talents whose work is now beginning to make a worldwide noise. One of the most promising of the group and by far the best known, 31-year-old

Richard Rodney Bennett, arrived in Manhattan last week with a resounding bang. Within 24 hours the crack Opera Theater at the Juilliard School gave Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur its American premiere and at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in his Symphony No. 2, which the orchestra had commissioned for its 125th anniversary year. Cinemagoers could also sample Bennett's style in his background score for Far from the Madding Crowd.

Londoner Bennett is one of a group of young Britons who have been touched, but not pushed over, by the twelve-tone style of Pierre Boulez, with whom he studied for a time. Mines, commissioned by Sadler's Wells and first performed there three years ago, partakes of some of the near-physical brutality associated with the twelve-tone style. Its story is a gothic horror tale: a trio of scoundrels murder an old man and are then brought to penance by a troupe of plague-infected actors who may or may not be ghosts. "I wanted to write a tough, violent piece," says Composer Bennett, and he succeeded. His large orchestra churns out great globs of dark-hued atmosphere, over which voices float with wisps of disconnected but curiously memorable melody.

From Mistakes, Profit. But brutality is only one side of Bennett's musical style; in his new symphony, and in his film score for John Schlesinger's moody translation of the Hardy novel, Bennett writes with a supple sense of melodic line and quiet, iridescent orchestral color. His Symphony offers the proposition that even at the furthest limits of harmony it is possible to reach a listener with broad melodic lines and ruddy emotionality. Although it speaks the orchestral language with assurance, the Symphony is obviously the work of a man who prefers opera to all other musical forms. "Opera is a way of life," he says.

Like most promising Britons, Bennett benefits greatly from his country's lavishness to composers. Sadler's Wells commissioned not one, but two operas, in the awareness that any composer can profit by first mistakes. The second, a comedy called A Penny for a Song, presented last November, shows the composer in even greater command of expressive forces than the relatively primitive Mines. Meanwhile, Mines has become established in the European repertory, with performances in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden, and one now in preparation in Czechoslovakia. With three operas (including an early one-acter), four string quartets, two symphonies, and a sheaf of smaller pieces to his credit--and a piano concerto and another opera in progress--Bennett has already reached a point envied by most composers and attained by a few: he can live quite comfortably off his royalties.

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