In 1958, shortly after returning to Britain from studying in Paris, the flautist William Bennett received a phone call: “Get to the Festival Hall as quick as you can. Sir Thomas Beecham is doing Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and is a player short. The rehearsal has already started.” This was soon followed by another call telling him to present himself in Manchester for an audition with the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, now the BBC Philharmonic.
Five days later Bennett, who has died aged 86 of motor neurone disease, was a member of that orchestra, and embarking on a career as one of the leading players of his generation. Both through influencing the development and design of the flute and making more than 100 recordings as a soloist, many of them on his own Beep Records label, he sought to give his instrument “the depth, dignity and grandeur of the voice or a string instrument”.
In 1960 he went to the Sadler’s Wells Orchestra for a year, and he succeeded James Galway as principal flute of the London Symphony Orchestra (1966-72). Then he went to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, but was soon fired for playing truant in order to do a world tour with the English Chamber Orchestra. This did not trouble him greatly as he enjoyed the freelancing life, and never became a full-time member of an orchestra again. In addition to the ECO, he freelanced with the London Mozart Players, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Pro Arte Orchestra.
There was plenty of chamber music: in the Mabillon Trio with the oboist Philip Jones and pianist Susan Bradshaw, and the Lyric Trio with the cellist Margaret Moncrieff and pianist Margaret Norman.
As a recitalist he travelled the world, often with the pianist Clifford Benson. With the harpsichordist George Malcolm, he made the first British recording of the complete Bach flute sonatas, and they joined the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in recording Bach’s Triple Concerto in A minor. With Osian Ellis Bennett recorded the Concerto for Flute and Harp by Mozart and much else. He also appeared with larger chamber groups, among them the Melos Ensemble and Nash Ensemble.
Several composers wrote solo works for him, including Winter Music by Richard Rodney Bennett and concertos by Diana Burrell, William Mathias and the Venezuelan composer Raimundo Pineda. Composers for his trios included Mathias, Jean-Michel Damase, Peter Racine Fricker and Cyril Scott.
To extend the repertoire, Bennett did “tons of pinching” from works for violin, including the entire Beethoven concerto and several Mozart violin concertos and sonatas. He unashamedly included these arrangements in his recitals, and acknowledged how much he had learned from the playing of violinists such as Fritz Kreisler and Adolf Busch.
Bennett also did commercial sessions: on one occasion, a group of people he had not met before “shambled in, bringing all sorts of instruments. One had a sack of bells from a junk-shop. None of them could read music. There was an Indian sitar player, so I went home and got my Indian flute to play along with him. A figure with an Afro haircut, red silk waistcoat and yellow silk trousers shouted across ‘Give flutie a mike will yer?’. He said my playing was ‘real groovy’ and we were ‘going for the take’. After it was all over I was told that this was Jimi Hendrix.”
Born in London, William was the son of Faith (nee Brooke) and Frank Bennett, both architects and acquired the nickname of Wibb from the acronym of his names. At the age of seven he was sent to Beltane school, a “progressive” establishment that was evacuated to Wiltshire during the second world war. While there, William bought a plastic flageolet from the nearby town of Melksham and, by bedtime, could play Clementine. He eventually acquired a plastic recorder, which he would play along with a wind-up gramophone. This was his first contact with the problems of pitch.
When he slowed the gramophone down, to learn the difficult parts, the pitch dropped. This early experience led eventually to his rebuilding and retuning his flutes in later life. Soon after this he heard a recording of a real flute, and realised that this was something far better than the recorder, so when he was 12 his mother bought him a thick, wooden Rudall Carte instrument. By the end of the first day he was playing Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze, and at the end of six months Bach sonatas and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, largely self-taught.
At the age of 15 he was accepted for lessons by Geoffrey Gilbert, who loaded his pupils with large quantities of scales and technical exercises, all of which he expected to be played through each day. The following year, 1952, Bennett entered the Guildhall School of Music, London. When the time came for national service in 1954 he joined the Scots Guards band, but still managed to continue his studies with Gilbert.
The three years in the band were an invaluable experience. New music appeared daily, often having to be transposed at sight and, under the fearsome conductor Sam Rhodes, no allowances were made. The repertoire was wide, and performing on bandstands without rehearsal was “hell at first, but a fantastic experience in retrospect”, making him an excellent sightreader.
In 1957 Bennett went to study with Fernand Caratgé in Paris. He kept a notebook with two columns: on the left side “Caratgé says this”, and on the right “Gilbert says this”. The right side usually won.
While there he was deeply inspired by hearing the playing of Fernand Dufrêne, and he had a few lessons with another admirer of Dufrêne, Jean-Pierre Rampal. The latter proved to be a big influence on Bennett’s phrasing: he believed in the necessity of developing a singing tone, and of being lighthearted and happy about playing the flute, an attitude that Bennett shared. Of a later period of study with another French flautist, Marcel Moyse, in Switzerland and France from 1965 onwards, Bennett said that the experience was like “having lessons from God”.
Bennett’s interest in pitch and tuning, which continued at school with his making of a flute from an old bicycle pump, led to the construction of several other instruments including a balalaika and a guitar. When he acquired a Morley flute, he began carving at the holes and moving the tone holes in order to get it to play in tune.
He then rebuilt an old Rudall Carte flute on to a new silver tube, making it as near to scale of a Powell flute as possible. He showed it to his teacher and, after a few adjustments, Gilbert pronounced it better in tune than a real Powell. This led to cooperation with the makers Elmer Cole and Albert Cooper and the development of the Cooper scale and the Bennett scale. For most of his career, Bennett played a Louis Lot (the same make of instrument as played by his hero Dufrêne), but tuned to his own scale. In 2012 he upgraded the Bennett scale, used for Altus flutes, from Japan, and Stephen Wessel flutes, from Somerset.
He ran master-classes and a summer school, and taught in Freiburg, Germany, and from 1986 at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1995 he was appointed OBE, and he continued to organise flute events until the coronavirus pandemic intervened.
The thread that ran though Bennett’s career was the sheer delight he took in flute-playing. When I asked him once about his most worrying moment, he had to think hard: it turned out to be coming in a bar late at the end of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture.
In 1961, he married Rhuna Martin, and they had two daughters. They divorced in 1980, and the following year he married Michie Komiyama. She survives him, along with their son, Timothy, his daughters, Vanora and Sophie, and grandchildren Luke, Joe and Naomi.
• William Ingham Brooke Bennett, flautist, born 7 February 1936; died 12 May 2022
• This article was amended on 18 May 2022. The composer Raimundo Pineda is Venezuelan, not Argentinian as an earlier version said.
