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3.11 - Mark Simpson

3.11 - Mark Simpson

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 Mark Simpson (b. 1988) is a UK-based composer of an acclaimed body of work and an internationally-renowned clarinettist, whose programmes champion music new and old. His music for the stage, orchestra, voices, and chamber forces has been celebrated by leading conductors, instrumentalists, and ensembles ; across a myriad of forms, poetic intensity is matched by technical assurance and expressive generosity.Much of Simpson’s music takes place after dark. When Simpson finished his chamber opera Pleasure the clock read five am. Pleasure is set in the toilets of a gay nightclub. In that nocturnal space confessions are made and lives come into focus; it sees Simpson unleash music of mystery and abandon by turns. Night Music was the title of a taut and elusive disc of chamber works released in 2016 on NMC.The somnolent world of dream and hallucination has shaped numerous pieces: Israfel for orchestra comes from the candle-burning poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; two works under the title Darkness Moves - for clarinet (2016) and horn (2024) respectively - take their names from the hallucinogenic imagination of Henri Michaux. The Immortal , an oratorio, finds a creative wellspring in the induced trances of Victorian mediums and occultists, who drew the curtains, lit the candles, and tried to channel the spirit world. Simpson has long come alive at night - as a youngster in Liverpool attending concerts at the Philharmonic Hall he sneaked into the Royal Box with his friends after the house lights went down. Listening to his music is not far from taking his hand in a séance.As the first ever winner of both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year prizes in 2006, Simpson’s career has always reflected the indivisibility of his composing and performing selves. This national acclaim led to a precocious Wigmore Hall debut, as well as his first major works as a composer, now published worldwide by Boosey & Hawkes. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, the University of Oxford, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Julian Anderson.A stint as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship Award-winner followed, succeeded in turn by a position as BBC Philharmonic Composer-in-Association. He composed sparks for the 2012 Last Night of the Proms. A debut chamber opera Pleasure (2016), to a libretto by Melanie Challenger, was commissioned by Opera North, Britten-Pears Arts, and the Royal Opera House.Israfel premiered with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Andrew Litton in 2014. The 12-minute piece evokes a Koranic angel imagined by Edgar Allan Poe, whose heart strings are a lute and who sings with the utmost sweetness. It captures Simpson’s fascination with the otherworldly, and, as its subject is a lyre, recalls Orpheus, the source of all music. “I wanted to write a piece that sang, floated, morphed, moved, moved us, lifted us, had power, had fragility, had hope, uncertainty, beauty”, Simpson writes. Its opening sets out the liquid transformations and elevated sensuality that preoccupy his work.Whilst his music searches out transcendental territories, Simpson’s demotic opera Pleasure turns back to the guts of the world. The touring debut production, directed by Tim Albery, saw Lesley Garrett play a toilet cleaner in a gay nightclub who sees, channels, and sings the largest of feelings, meeting a pair of lost souls and a ketchup-covered drag queen. “It turns out to be the perfect operatic subject”, Alfred Hickling wrote in The Guardian, “squalid and earthbound yet imbued with a radiant, almost mythic quality.” It received its German premiere in 2023 at Theater Erfurt.Simpson’s tone poem A mirror-fragment (2008), written for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, was his first exploration of Melanie Challenger’s writing, inspired by the opening poem of her collection Galatea. At 11 minutes, A mirror-fragment opens concerts rather than collections of poetry, and captures a style that is both nervily present and plugged into the depthless, mythic past. It was unfinished artistic business. Simpsons suggested the scenario for Pleasure the first night they met - another nocturnal mission.The Immortal arose in turn. Commissioned by the Manchester International Festival and premiered by the BBC Philharmonic, Manchester Chamber Choir, EXAUDI, and baritone Mark Stone, it is is an anguished forty minute span, drawing on texts from the Society of Psychical Research, showing the contortions of the spirit as it confronts the abyss of mortality; The Guardian called it an “anti-Gerontius”. Its ‘Lachrymosa’ sees strings and voices wrung out as exhausted tears flow, before a wounded baritone solo. It won the Southbank Sky Arts Award for classical music in 2016. The same searching quality belongs to his motet Ave Maria (2016), written for ORA Singers, and featured on their album Stella - fitful music of a sleepless ...
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