Article published in Manchester Evening News 26 June 2015

MARK SIMPSON is a product of the Junior Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester who has rocketed to fame, both as solo clarinettist and composer. 

He was made the BBC Philharmonic’s new composer-in-association, he’s working on a chamber opera for Opera North to be premiered next spring, and The Immortal, An Oratorio gets its world premiere from the BBC Philharmonic, alongside Mozart’s Requiem, in the Manchester International Festival on July 4. 

Mark won the BBC Young Musician competition and the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year Competition in 1988, aged 17 – the first person to do that ‘double’. 

He studied at Oxford and the Guildhall School in London, and is now published by Boosey & Hawkes. He’s won the 2010 Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Award and had a piece performed at the Last Night of the Proms, as well as writing other works for major orchestras. He was part of Manchester Camerata’s Composers’ Project earlier this year. 

The Immortal is for baritone (Mark Stone), an eight-solo-voice chamber choir (virtuoso singing group EXAUDI), chorus (Manchester Chamber Choir) and orchestra. Its words by Melanie Challenger are based on a book about Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research. 

Myers and other séance-attenders in the Edwardian period were convinced they were hearing genuine messages from the ‘other side’, and documented them, along with the results of so-called automatic writing. 

Mark says: “Melanie compiled some of her text from these scripts, and she’s also written a kind of monodrama, interspersed among them, which represents the voice of Frederic Myers. 

“He and others like him had a firm belief in the afterlife, but we can see now that it was fuelled by deep personal loss. We both find that very poignant – there was that human desire to communicate with someone who had been lost.  

“The main thrust of the work is that by empathizing with his situation we’re able to understand how his mind worked. 

“The first four minutes are full of a kind of swirling, weird sound, where you can’t tell what the words are – they’re all coming at you together. So I hope no one complains ‘I couldn’t hear the text’! 

“The larger chorus and EXAUDI are essentially singing, or reciting, the scripts from actual séances. It’s very difficult and virtuosic material.”