Bennett Choral Works – NYCoS National Girls Choir/Bell

Richard Rodney Bennett never quite got the credit he deserved for being two composers at once, and both of them honest. There was the pupil of Boulez who could turn out a serial score bristling with the correct dissonances, and there was the son of a children’s book illustrator (his mother knew Holst, his father wrote verse) who never stopped believing that music ought to give pleasure to the people making it. This disc, assembled in the last months of his life — the booklet notes still speak of him, poignantly now, in the present tense — makes the case for the second composer.

The revelation here, if there is one, is how early that populist instinct declared itself. The Aviary, dating from 1966, was written while Bennett was still supplying twelve-tone film cues and stage scores to London’s more advanced theatrical circles. Yet there’s nothing austere about it. The writing for young voices sits comfortably, almost conversationally, in the throat — birdsong transmuted into something a twelve-year-old alto can actually sing in tune, which is no small feat of craft. Compare it with the knottier choral writing Britten’s own imitators were producing in the same decade and you hear how much more Bennett trusted melody to do the emotional work.

The NYCoS National Girls Choir — the double “national,” Scottish and youth-choir both, is never explained in Malcolm MacDonald’s otherwise distinguished notes, and one learns to live with it — sings with a bright, unforced tone that never curdles into preciousness. Christopher Bell has trained these young singers (sixty-seven of them, ages twelve to sixteen) to shape a phrase rather than merely execute it. Diction is clean; you barely need the printed texts, though you’ll want to read them anyway, if only for their nerve.

Letters to Lindbergh, which lends the disc its title, is the highlight, and also the strangest thing on the program. Bennett sets a sequence of mock-epistles addressed to Charles Lindbergh mid-flight — from Captain Scott, fretting about a cat named Penguin who has read an encyclopedia article and now believes himself a bird; from the Titanic, requesting a Parisian shopping list to make its resting place on the ocean floor more comfortable; from Pluto the cartoon dog, anxious about his standing with Mickey and “Uncle Walt.” It’s gorgeous nonsense, and Bennett resists the temptation to mickey-mouse the text line by line. Instead he gives the choir a bluff, Waltonian energy over a piano-duet accompaniment (Philip Moore and Andrew West, crisp and clearly enjoying themselves) that swings with real Gershwin snap — syncopations that land where a Broadway pit pianist would put them, not where a concert composer thinks they should go.

The Ballad of Sweet William turns colder — a setting of a Scottish ghost ballad, all creaking modal harmonies and hushed dynamics. Even here Bennett won’t quite let the chill settle. There’s a wink under the strangeness, and it never becomes Britten’s Serenade territory, however much the model hovers nearby. Dream-Songs, by contrast, drifts into a more veiled, impressionistic sound-world, closer to the Poulenc that Bennett revered than to anything English.

None of this quite adds up to major Bennett — the composer’s best work remains, for my money, in the film scores (Murder on the Orient Express, that sumptuous, unembarrassed Ravel pastiche) and in the jazz-inflected chamber and vocal pieces he wrote for Cleo Laine. But as a documentary portrait of a composer who never stopped writing for the joy of the performer, whatever their age or ability, this collection is close to indispensable. There is no rival disc that assembles quite this cross-section, and I doubt there will be one soon.

The engineering is warm without blurring the choir’s consonants, the balance between voices and piano is ideally judged, and the whole disc runs a lean fifty-odd minutes without a wasted bar. A modest disc, then, but not a minor one. Bennett would have been pleased, I think, to be remembered this way — not as a problem for the historians to solve, but as a composer who could still make a roomful of teenagers sound like they were having the time of their lives.