Romance-Impromptu

A piano piece by a very important composer and influential musician that we probably overlook.

Arthur Leslie Benjamin (18 September 1893, in Sydney – 10 April 1960, in London) was an Australian composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. Best known as the composer of Jamaican Rumba (1938) and of the Storm Clouds Cantata, featured in both versions of the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man who Knew Too Much, in 1934 and 1956.

At the age of six, he made his first public appearance as a pianist and in 1911, attended the Royal College of Music (RCM), where he studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford, harmony and counterpoint with Thomas Dunhill, and piano with Frederic Cliffe.

He returned to Australia in 1919 and became piano professor at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney. He returned to England in 1921 to become piano professor at the RCM where his better-known students from that era include Muir Mathieson, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Miriam Hyde, Joan Trimble, Stanley Bate, Bernard Stevens, Lamar Crowson, Alun Hoddinott and Dorian Le Gallienne.

Benjamin resigned from his post at the RCM and left to settle in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he remained for the duration of the war. In 1941, he was appointed conductor of the newly formed CBC Symphony Orchestra, holding the post until 1946. During that time he gave "literally hundreds" of Canadian first performances. After a series of radio talks and concerts in addition to music teaching, conducting and composing, he became a major figure in Canadian musical life. He frequently visited the United States, broadcasting and arranging many performances of contemporary British music.

A major original work written during the 1950s was the Harmonica Concerto (1953), written for Larry Adler.

Arthur Benjamin gave a number of important premieres including the British premiere of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Music attached below.