- Composer, arranger, musician and conductor Robert Russell Bennett studied piano with his mother and other instruments with his bandmaster father, and also with Carl Busch and Nadia Boulanger (honorary DHL, Franklin & Marshall College and Guggenheim fellowships). He began conducting at 11, was organist at a Kansas City theatre and a violinist and violist with string ensembles. He came to New York in 1916 and joined G. Schirmer. In World War I he conducted army bands, and in 1922 he became an arranger for Broadway musicals; his productions included "Rose-Marie", "Sunny", "The Band Wagon", "Of Thee I Sing", "The Cat and the Fiddle", "Face the Music", "Show Boat", "Oklahoma!", "Kiss Me, Kate", "South Pacific", "The King and I", "The Sound of Music", "My Fair Lady", and "Camelot". He was affiliated with NBC's Project Twenty (1954) since 1954. He joined ASCAP in 1935 and was the former president of the NAACC. His compositions include "Abraham Lincoln, Sights and Sounds (RCA Victor awards)", the opera "Maria Malibran", "Hollywood (on a League of Composers commission)", "8 Etudes for Symphony Orchestra (on a CBS commission)", "Charleston Rhapsody", "Concerto Grosso", "Stephen Foster", "Armed Forces Salute", "Symphonic Songs for Band", "Suite of Old American Dances", "Song Sonata for Violin, Piano", "Organ Sonata", "Hexapoda", "4 Freedoms Symphony", "Celebration", "Symphonic Story of Jerome Kern", "He is Risen (Emmy award)", "The Enchanted Kiss" and "An Hour of Delusion (1-act operas)", "Suite for Band Track Meet", and "Commemmoration Symphony".- IMDb Mini Biography By: Hup234! (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)
- From the 1920s to about 1965, he was the most prominent and (many people say) the best orchestrator of Broadway shows. He not only orchestrated all of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows except for "Carousel" and the little-known and not very successful "Me and Juliet", but also many of Jerome Kern's shows (including "Show Boat", for which he not only created the orchestrations for the 1927 Broadway original, the 1932 revival, and the 1936 film version, but also some new ones for the 1946 and 1966 revivals). He also orchestrated most of George Gershwin's, Irving Berlin's and Cole Porter's shows, in addition to which he orchestrated most of the original stage version of "My Fair Lady" as well as Rudolf Friml's "Rose Marie", the film version of "Oklahoma!" and most of the music in the stage version of "Camelot".
- His orchestration of "The March of the Siamese Children" for the stage version of "The King and I" was considered so excellent that it was the only one of his orchestrations for the stage production which was exactly duplicated for the 1956 film (although augmented for full orchestra).
- The orchestrations for the original production of "Finian's Rainbow" were divided between Bennett and Don Walker.
- He orchestrated the original 1965 Broadway production of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever".
- Won a Special Tony Award in 1957, for his body of work as an orchestrator.
- [on Oscar Hammerstein II] [Jerome] Kern would play pieces for me and I'd say, 'Is that the verse or the chorus?' And Jerry used to die because I couldn't tell which was which. One day he showed me this thing, and I put out a piano part to it. This one didn't fall into the same category - that kind of piece Kern wrote that confused me - but it was a meandering sort of thing. It didn't go much of anywhere, when you just took the tune by itself. But the minute you got Oscar's words to it - 'Tote dat barge, lift dat bale, git a little drunk an' you land in jail' - you had a real poet.
- [on Irving Berlin] Irving couldn't play a scale, an arpeggio - nothing. He had no piano technique at all. But inside, he hears it. I remember in particular, when we were together and he was doing a song for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the picture 'Carefree'. It's called 'Change Partners'. He came to a spot in this, where he played a plain diminished chord, and he turned to me helplessly and said, 'Is that the right chord?' 'Well' I said, 'I don't think it's the chord you hear, somehow or other'. He said, 'No, that's not it. You play me a chord there'. I played him one. He said, 'No, that's not it'. I played another. 'That's it!' he said. He couldn't put his fingers on it, but he knew which one it should be. Fantastic.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content