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Bennett: Orchestral Works, Vol. 5 on SACD

John Wilson conducts a series of orchestral works of his mentor and friend Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, which now reaches Volume 5, featuring three works composed between 1973 and 1989. Son of professional musicians, Bennett demonstrated musical talent from an early age and went on to study with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley, and later Pierre Boulez. He produced more than 200 works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television. He was also a writer and performer of jazz songs for fifty years. Immersed in the techniques of the European avant-garde via his contact with Boulez, he subsequently developed his own dramatic-abstract style. In later years, he adopted an increasingly tonal idiom. The Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned at the instigation of Brian Priestman, the British chief conductor of the Denver Symphony Orchestra. It's three-movement structure, closing with a dazzling set of variations, displays the modern orchestra as a virtuoso body of players. His rarely performed cello concerto Sonnets to Orpheus was written for the Edinburgh International Festival, and premiered by Heinrich Schiff. Diversions was a commission from the Haberdashers' Aske's Schools, in north London, to celebrate their tercentenary, in 1990. It was first played by the combined orchestras of all seven schools at a celebration concert in the Royal Festival Hall and the finished work is an exuberantly colourful set of symphonic variations based on the Scottish folksong 'Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad'.