For his scoring work, Bennett was nominated for a total of 10 BAFTA Awards, winning once for Best Original Music for the film Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

[5] His mother, Joan Esther, née Spink (1901–1983)[6] was a pianist who had trained with Gustav Holst and sang in the first professional performance of The Planets.

Ferguson regarded him as extraordinarily brilliant, having perhaps the greatest talent of any British composer in his generation, though lacking in a personal style.

Immersed in the techniques of the European avant-garde via his contact with Boulez, Bennett subsequently developed his own dramato-abstract style.

Bennett and Martin performed at such venues as The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, and The Pheasantry and Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London.

[13] The first exhibition of his collages was in London in 2010, at the South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre, curated by the Nightingale Project, a charity that takes music and art into hospitals.

[17] Bennett is survived by his sister Meg (born 1930), the poet M. R. Peacocke, with whom he collaborated on a number of vocal works.

At the BBC Proms for example his Murder on the Orient Express Suite was performed in a concert of film music, and in the same season his Dream Dancing and Jazz Calendar were also featured.

Also at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 23 March 2011 (a few days before his 75th birthday), a double concert took place in which his Debussy-inspired piece Sonata After Syrinx was performed in the first concert, and in the Late Night Jazz Event which followed, Bennett and Claire Martin performed his arrangements of the Great American Songbook (Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and so on).