On the recital program which Pianist José Iturbi played in Manhattan last week a composer with the prosaic name of Bennett kept company with Haydn, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt. Haydn and Schumann provided meaty sonatas for impish Iturbi to play in his neat, polished style. Chopin and Brahms showed him expertly romantic. Liszt exercised his strong, fleet fingers. But none of these great ones overshadowed the man named Bennett. He contributed four miniature studies, descriptions of sights he had seen in Paris. They were so vivid and neatly wrought that listeners could fairly see the children Bennett had seen playing behind Notre-Dame, the glimpse of Montmartre's tinseled night life, the noisy Place d' Italic with its reek of garlic, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier which through Bennett's eyes seemed more futile than impressive.
When he had finished playing the studies and a less effective fox trot, Iturbi pointed out a tall blond man with a foxlike face sitting in a box. Robert Russell Bennett stood up and, for one of the rare times since he stopped playing every instrument in a boys' band in Freeman, Mo., faced an audience. In Manhattan for 13 years Russell Bennett has practised his trade behind scenes. He works for Harms, the music-publishers. When a songwriter like Jerome Kern or George Gershwin wants to put on a show he takes his tunes to Harms for Russell Bennett to orchestrate.
Bennett's clients are aware that his smart variations, his rich counterpoint, will do wonders for the simplest song, but until lately none of them bothered to put his name on the program. They changed their ways when serious musicians started praising his talent. The fact that Bennett can sit down at a drawing board, turn out 80 pages of orchestration a day while his wife reads to him or plays the radio, will seem less significant to laymen than a list of the current shows he has had a hand in. He prepared most of the scores for Music in the Air, Of Thee I Sing, Flying Colors, Take a Chance and Gay Divorce. He lent his expert touch to George Gershwin's Pardon My English which opened last week in Philadelphia; to Walk a Little Faster in which Beatrice Lillie opened this week; to Sissy, Fritz Kreisler's operetta opening this month in Vienna. Bennett's jobs are piled high ahead. He is collaborating with Critic Robert A. Simon of The New Yorker on an opera. Philip Barry is having him write a musical background for a new play. Kreisler and Iturbi have commissioned him to write them concertos.