He’s only 26, but Mark Simpson is already a leading light of the contemporary music world. Mark’s big break came in 2006, when he won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year, playing the clarinet, and the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year. He has since pursued parallel and equally successful careers. As a clarinettist, he appears regularly with major orchestras and chamber groups, and is an ardent champion of new music, not just his own. His compositions cover a wide range of genres and ensembles, and, through a series of recent major commissions, have increasingly focussed on music for symphony orchestra. His virtuoso showpiece Sparks opened the Last Night of the Proms in 2012, and he has since written for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Britten Sinfonia and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Earlier this year, the BBC Philharmonic appointed Mark Composer in Association. He also has an opera project planned for 2016, commissioned jointly by Royal Opera, Opera North and the Aldeburgh Festival.
But before that, Mark has another major work to unveil, The Immortal, which will feature at the 2015 Manchester International Festival. The oratorio explores obsessions with the occult in Victorian England and follows the story of Frederic Myers and his attempts to prove the existence of life after death. It will be Mark’s most substantial work yet, employing large orchestra, double choir and baritone soloist. Here, and in the Manchester International Festival podcast, Mark discusses this unique project, what attracted him to the story, and how he plans to draw the audience into this macabre and unsettling world:
“The starting point for the piece was John Gray’s book The Immortalization Commission, which is about the human obsession with cheating death. The first part is about the phenomenon of occultism and séances around the end of the Victorian era. I really felt I knew the characters, but more importantly I felt I could hear something. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, just that there was a lot of possibility here to do something.
“Frederic Myers was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research. He, and the people around him, Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick, a famous ethics professor, and Arthur Balfour [later Prime Minister], were scientifically trying to prove that there was existence beyond death. They would do séances and each séance was recorded meticulously. Every single piece of paper that was written on in the act of semi-trance automatic writing was archived and exists today in Trinity College, Cambridge. I went to Cambridge to look at the texts, called cross correspondences. They are fascinating: sprawls of craziness, in Greek, in Latin, in pictures, in different-sized handwriting, in perfect calligraphy, in scrawls. They are so beguiling and so interesting, they seemed so raw in potential.
“John Gray got into the reasons why these people were doing what they were doing, and it basically came down to deep personal tragedy or deep personal loss. In the case of Frederic Myers, he lost his childhood sweetheart, Annie Marshall. She drowned herself. When Myers died, he left an autobiographical sketch called Fragments of Inner Life, essentially a confession. He confesses that the reason why he pursued this his whole life was because he was searching for Annie Marshall, his long-lost love. That became the main thrust for the work, that and these swirling texts.