Bennett’s Serenades, a five-movement choral suite, was premiered in a broadcast by the BBC Singers conducted by Stephen Cleoobury in December 2007. Here Bennett sets poems by one of the great eccentrics of English letters, John Skelton (c.1460-1529), sometime ‘poet laureate of Oxford’ and tutor to the future Henry VIII, later Rector of Diss in Norfolk, satirist and lyricist. His ‘Skeltonics’—short three-stressed lines with persistent but irregular rhyming—make his poems particularly apt for lively setting (as Vaughan Williams proved in his Five Tudor Portraits to Skelton poems). Bennett’s Serenades are also mainly portraits of women whom Skelton praised or dispraised in verse. These are the odes by turns lyrical, abusive and playful, to Mistress Margaret Hussey, Mistress Margery Wentworth, the highly inconstant Mistress Anne and Mistress Isabel Pennell. The exception is ‘My Darling Dear’, a ballad of seduction which Bennett sets in such a haunting manner that Skelton’s satire is transmuted into something altogether more romantic.

from notes by Malcolm MacDonald © 2012