Richard Rodney Bennett

Garland for Marjory Fleming

Composer, performer and arranger Richard Rodney Bennett was internationally respected for his serious music and many award-winning film scores (Murder on the Orient Express, Nicholas and Alexandra) as well as his works forchildren and his religious pieces. The playful and sensitive side of Bennett comes to the fore with this delightful setting of five songs of poems by Marjorie Fleming. Marjorie Fleming was a very young Scottish poetess who wasborn in Kirkcaldy in 1803 and died just eight years later, leaving journals and a handful of poems. Her words are artless and evocative, her spelling and language inventive. 'Three Turkeys now their last have breathed, Andnowthis world forever leaved, ' she writes in A Melancholy Lay.
This set of art songs is witty and poignant.