A few insights on the orchestral pieces of the lively and prolific Richard Rodney Bennett (“A Collage Artist” will be the post’s title) to be finished as soon as I, one, do a little necessary sex writing, and, two, actually buy the complete Chandos 4-volume set of the work of John’s distinguished mentor, conducted by John. For now, here’s a recording from a BBC broadcast (yes, bonny John is conductor) that starts off with a few words from the composer himself:
Above my beloved John at 28 and his major musical influence, Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) [download PDF of Feb 2020 issue of Gramophone with John’s interview here]: Concerto for Stan Getz (I know I knocked their album Orchestral Jazz and rightly so, but this is a swell picture)
By the way John, with your brimming schedule I can imagine you’re not much of a reader, but I’m sure like many you like having useful books at hand, so here are a couple in pdf:
- Sacred Architecture of London by Nigel Pennick / I read a lot of Nigel Pennick. Same Peter Ackroyd. This is a nice companion to the book you were reading in lockdown, London: The Biography (“My Beloved Conductor John Wilson’s Lockdown Listening List: Keely Smith, Teddy Wilson, Walton, Elgar, Brahms, Ireland, Debussy, Peter Ackroyd; Plus Yusef Lateef“). If you liked London, I especially recommend Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.
- Grown in Great Britain, DK Publications 2008 / I created a few down home recipes for you in my posting (“Alt.Spiritual Gateshead, UK and Five Easy Cooking Recipes for My Bonny Geordie, BBC Conductor John Wilson“)—with this book you can think up your own.
NOTE: “[The English temperament] is disciplinable, and steadily obedient to certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence, [with a propensity for] spending its exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain sense, of practical utility.” ~ Matthew Arnold The Study of Celtic Literature (1867)
- “The Story So Far, with Conductor John Wilson”
- “The Story So Far; Or, Conductor John Wilson—His Limits”
- Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 1
- Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 2
- Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 3
- Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 4
Above Cregar’s mad composer: Bernard Herrmann’s 
Above John’s dear face: Tony Bennett with Bill Charlap on the piano in a thrilling rendition, from 2015, of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 
Above: 
The now torn-down 
Dick Cavett and Anthony Burgess on my old B&W portable, a US knockoff made by the same company that cornered the 70s East Coast market in prepackaged noodle soup, Pho King. Above the interlocutors: 
Above proudly nude Salome in the 1991 Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera directed by Ewing’s husband at the time, Sir Peter Hall: 
That’s Lena Headey in her first screen role. Above Lena, Grant Warnock and Jeremy Irons: 
Taken at a banquet of an old Filipino-American association my dad was part of (that’s him under the picture on the right; keep forgetting he still had hair before I was born), one of about a hundred around at the time. Note the date: only a couple of weeks before Pearl Harbor. Note also the Philippine flag on the wall. The Philippines wasn’t yet a sovereign nation but a Commonwealth and didn’t achieve independence till 1946.
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 