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 consciousness.
Simpson’s Cello Concerto (2016-18), written for Leonard Elschenbroich and the BBC Philharmonic, follows a recognisable fast-slow-fast pattern, but, like The Immortal, leans on achingly expressive unfurling melodic lines from the soloist, offering music that is both emotionally compelling as well as mysterious. The Times called it "airborne, kaleidoscopic, swirling with life..contemporary music with a pulsing heart…irresistible”.
A Violin Concerto followed in 2021. At 38 minutes it is among Simpson’s most substantive orchestral statements, and its five-movement structure gives the concerto a symphonic richness and complexity in the handling of its material. It is “full-on, big-hearted…a delirious outpouring” (The Scotsman); the Financial Times called it “a concerto that will blow the mind”. The emotional effusiveness that struck reviewers all takes place within a keenly wrought structure. It is a ruthlessly inventive and virtuosic tour de force for its champion Nicola Benedetti, who debuted the work with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda in spring 2021. It was co-commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony, WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and has since appeared at the Concertgebouw and Usher Hall.
The emotional range across its five interlocking parts shows Simpson’s expressive confidence and open-heartedness. “If a concert really grabs me”, Simpson said in an interview, “I can feel the part of my brain that’s on fire”. The tarantella finale of the concerto must’ve been composed with this in mind. It’s a roof-raising final peroration, swept along by castanets, that also turns back towards the lamentation and introspection that began the work.
“It’s music that’s pitched at a level of sustained emotional intensity”, Tom Service wrote of Simpson’s work in The Guardian, “a heightened, dangerous, disorienting place where Simpson wants to take his listeners.” This is exemplified in Ariel (2009), one selection from an outstanding body of chamber compositions. Scored for the same instruments as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with textural nuance provided by basset clarinet, it takes its title and energies from Slyvia Plath. The 15-minute work has a tender melodic motif at its heart, which appears in fractured and partial ways. Its final minutes see it realised in an intense and sensuous release, before dissolving and collapsing into darkness again.
Plath’s poem ends by looking at the sun - a “cauldron of morning”. Simpson’s Geysir for wind ensemble, composed as a companion work to Mozart’s “Gran Partita” Serenade, is a cooking vessel all of its own. An award-winning recording released on Orchid Classics, it draws on Mozart’s bubbling figuration from that piece to manifest a sumptuous and seething surface that is quite different - redolent of an Icelandic hot spring - that rises to a furious boil before subsiding. It was recorded alongside Mozart’s masterpiece with a crack team of internationally-celebrated soloists including Nicholas Daniel, Ben Goldscheider and Amy Harman - an expression of the collegiality underlying Simpson’s work as both instrumentalist and composer.
This ethos pervades Simpson’s work as a clarinettist. Shamanic performances of Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto, Helmut Lachenmann’s Dal niente, and his own Darkness Moves, share the otherworldly, trance-like character of his compositions; renditions of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time have a more austere but equally hieratic character. He returns to Lachenmann’s music for a programme of his music in February 2025 at the Muziekgebouw.
Simpson has appeared with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including the BBC Philharmonic, Royal Northern Sinfonia, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and, of course, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. As a chamber musician his colleagues are equally esteemed. He has shared the concert platform with Isabelle Faust, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Antoine Tamestit, and Jean-Guihen Queryas. Recent premieres include Simon Holt's Joy Beast (2017), a concerto for basset clarinet, and Edmund Finnis' Four Duets (2012) for clarinet and piano
Thomas Adès has proven a key collaborator. In 2023 and 2024 he joined the composer on the concert platform at the La Jolla Music Society SummerFest, performing works by Adès and others; in May 2025 Adès conducts Israfel with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2021 Simpson premiered basset clarinet quintet Alchymia with Quatuor Diotima. The waves of growing intensity in the sinuous figuration of the first movement seem conceived with none other than Simpson in mind; the serene Dowland-inspired third movement reflects his melodic intuition.
It was recorded on Orchid Classics, and widely acclaimed. The Guardian called Simpson “careful and delicate” in an “immaculate” recording, championing “some of the best recent chamber music of any composer”. The Times noted that “Simpson eloquently led us through…four spellbinding movements”; it was “everything either composer or listener could wish for”, said Music-Web International. In November 2024 he will present Alchymia again in Paris at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, following previous performances of the work on the main stage of Teatro alla Scala, the Elbphilharmonie, BOZAR, and at the Aix Festival.
Forthcoming projects include Hold Your heart in Your teeth, a viola concerto for Timothy Ridout, premiering in December 2024 with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Its title is taken from a Romanian saying that counsels fearlessness - its proverbial character captures the groundedness of Simpson’s expressive project as well as its raw, embodied familiarity. The Ebsjerg Ensemble will premiere The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in the 24/25 season, a wind quintet whose inspiration comes from John Koenig, a linguist creating words that do not yet exist for heightened, idiosyncratic states of feeling. It captures the way Simpson’s music traverses the border of sensation and understanding, structure and immediacy, in a body of work whose expressive and intellectual contours are being continually redefined.
