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Why has no one mentioned Mr. Bennett's compositional work? We put out something of his on Bay Cities (maybe his violin concerto - with Louis Kaufman playing?) and it was wonderful music. He was much more than just an orchestrator.
Your Bay Cities recording of the Violin Concerto was conducted by none other than Bernard Herrmann.
Incidentally, Robert Russell Bennett orchestrated many of the large cues for Alfred Newman’s score to Gunga Din. I was a little surprised that he contributed so much.
Conducting his Sights & Sounds and Abraham Lincoln: A Likeness in Symphony Form was truly inspiring and very difficult. Sights & Sounds has a section written in 7/8 time, which on it’s own is no problem at all, but Bennett makes it difficult by having half of the orchestra emphasizing the first part of the measure and the other half of the orchestra emphasizing the last part of the measure. Conducting that is basically like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. When you finally get it right and up to speed it’s very satisfying though.
I am quite proud of that Naxos recording, but I would love to have another shot at those pieces one day. There is a lot to discover in his music – very colorful and extremely well written music, and I think I merely scratched the surface with my recording.
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In fact your recording is sitting here in my play stack. Is their other orchestral work out there?
I’m not really sure how many more pieces there are, but I’m very curious to hear his Symphony in D for Dodgers that I read about once. Does anyone know of a recording of this piece?
I loved playing his band pieces when I was a kid. I played 1st horn in my high school band. Great memories.
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I've just finished Robert Russell Bennett's autobiography, "The Broadway Sound" -- engaging, revelatory -- a wonderful read.
I had no idea of the scope of Mr. Bennett's various works for film (or for that matter of his extraordinary non-theatrical/film works – some of which have been recorded by Mr. Stromberg on Naxos). Other than his well known contributions to "Victory at Sea" -- I did not know that he had composed for and orchestrated so many other films and TV series.
In one intriguing section on his Hollywood career (but one musical career of many!) he notes, "Two films for which I did quite a big job of anonymous music were officially by two of the best of all time, Alfred Newman and Franz Waxman. They were at the height of their careers and were overworked. The pictures were good ones: ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ and ‘Rebecca’. Sharing a score with one of these great fellows was an education, an education you can’t get from any book or school. They knew all the pitfalls and all of the answers of the profession. I used the word ‘anonymous’; perfect background scoring must be anonymous. It must sneak into the pulse of the viewer and stay out of his conscious mind. Franz Waxman ran a film with his music in it for me once. At the end of the picture he started to talk about the end of the music. It, he said, was the first example of a score that finished with two trumpets, loud, on a sustained dissonance – B and C, for instance, a half-tone apart. I hadn’t noticed it. All I noticed was that the picture ended just right. Of course, after he spoke, I could go over the last part of the music in my mind and realize what he had done, but it never had a chance of being heard while the story was coming to its end. The film was 1935's The Bride of Frankenstein.’”
RRB wrote a great book on arranging "INSTRUMENTALLY SPEAKING" published in 1975 by Belwin-Mills.
Part One is The Music Arranger In The Theatre. Great book if you can find it.
Despite the enormity of his achievements in music, Mr. Bennett is, among other things, extremely modest in his assessment of his contributions to film and musical theater. So much so that the fact that he admits to contributing to these two scores at all indicates that he contributed quite a bit!
He comes across as a generous, kind, loving, brilliant soul. Some of our fellow FSM’ers may have been friends with, or worked with, Mr. Bennett. Any idea as to what we should attribute to him in “Hunchback” and “Rebecca”?
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