Benjamin Frankel(1906-1973)

Composer, conductor, arranger and music director. Trained Cologne, Berlin and London (at the Guildhall school of Music and Drama). From the age of seventeen, earned a living as a jazz fiddler, pianist and arranger in, among others, Carroll Gibbons' Savoy Orpheans and Henry Hall's BBC Dance Orchestra. Entered films in 1934, ultimately working on over a hundred scores for cinema, theatre and television. Also worked as music director on shows of C.B.Cochrane and Noel Coward in London's West end. His works for the concert hall gained recognition toward the end of the War, with a string of fine chamber works and, in 1951, the Violin Concerto "In memory of the Six Million" who had perished in the Holocaust. His reputation as a serious composer was later affirmed by a series of eight symphonies and an opera, "Marching Song", from the play by John Whiting, all composed between 1958 and his death in 1973. His concert music during this period combined a late-romantic quality with the twelve-tone (serial) principles laid down by Arnold Schoenberg and his score for the 1960 film "Curse of the Werewolf" is believed to be the first in Britain have been based on upon them. Reputedly, he was the highest paid British composer of film music, during the 1950s.