One of Britain's most versatile musicians has died: he was 76. Richard Rodney Bennett's career embraced composition and performance in a variety of genres, as comfortable performing jazz standards in cabaret as he was writing symphonies, a cappella choral works or film scores.

Bennett's early encounter with Elizabeth Lutyens opened his ears to modernism in music following a dissatisfaction with the traditional approach exemplified by his teachers Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson. He studied with Pierre Boulez and visited the summer schools Darmstadt, and while he never embraced serialism completely, Bennett certainly employed serial techniques within a generally tonal, neo-Romantic language. 

In the field of 'art music' Bennett wrote three symphonies, many concertante works, chamber music and choral works. He also wrote for the opera house: his The Mines of Sulphur was commissioned by Sadler's Wells in 1965 but it was not a medium he found particularly congenial. Among recent compositions was a work, Reflections on a Scottish Folk Song, for cello and string orchestra, written in memory of the Queen Mother and commissioned by HRH The Prince of Wales. Of his film scores, the best known is that for Murder on the Orient Express (1974); others include Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). He was twice nominated for an Oscar.

As a performer, Bennett was a consummate jazz musician, earning a major reputation as a cabaret pianist, for many years alongside the jazz singer Marian Montgomery, and also with Karin Krog, Mary Cleere Haran and Claire Martin.

Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music in the early 1960s, at Baltimore's Peabody Institute in the early 1970s and held an International Chair at the RAM from 1994 to 2000. He was awarded a CBE in 1977 and was knighted in 1998. From 1979 onwards, he lived in New York.