Review: Mark Simpson's The Immortal at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall ****

Mark Simpson has revealed what he calls his ‘big and wild’ ambitions were ignited by the performances he watched and music he experienced as a youngster listening to concerts at the Philharmonic Hall.

But while he may have dreamed a dream, one wonders if the Liverpool schoolboy really imagined he’d one day be feted as the orchestra that so influenced his youth premiered his own compositions in the same concert hall.

Over the two decades and counting of his professional career, the award-winning composer and clarinettist has seen several premieres of his work in Hope Street and on other city stages.

But perhaps none quite so astonishing and singular as The Immortal, his Southbank Sky Arts Award-winning 2016 piece for orchestra and voices, which this year’s RLPO artist in residence has reworked and pared down for performance at the Philharmonic Hall.

Simpson has said he wrote the audacious sturm und drang occult oratorio in an almost trance-like state, and he certainly seems to have channelled sounds from another world.

One of the early guiding maxims I was given as a youthful journalist (back in the mists of time) was ‘tell the story as though you were explaining it to someone in the pub’.

So, how to describe the physical effect of The Immortal to the uninitiated?

Remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the baddies open up the Ark of the Covenant, only to let out a wrathful, wailing spectral host who proceed to tear through the crowd until the onlookers’ faces melt and they explode into sparks in a roiling divine fire?

That.

Above: The RLPO performs Mark Simpson's The Immortal. Top: Simpson, baritone soloist Rory Musgrave and conductor Daniela Candillari take a bow. Photos by Gareth Jones.

The original work had a full choir along with a sub-chorus and a riot of percussion. This premiere of the new version, under the baton of Daniela Candillari (more of her anon) shed the main chorus and, apparently, even more percussion than was crammed onto the Phil’s staging.

The gothic work, with a libretto by Melanie Challenger, explores the world of Victorian scholar Frederic Myers who founded the Society for Psychical Research which carried out seances to attempt to discover if there was life after death.

And The Immortal of the title refers to his young love, who drowned herself, Ophelia-like, causing Myers to carry a deep emotional wound which he only revealed towards the end of his life. Indeed, at one point, baritone soloist Rory Musgrave, essaying Myers, sings: “I wanted her to be immortal.”

Bravo to Candillari who maintained masterful control of the sometimes eerie, often fearsomely raging, forces of orchestra and voices while also giving Musgrave, possessor of a sonorous bass-baritone, space and stillness to effectively deliver the existential work’s reflective solo passages.

The soloist was mic-ed up, which I'm not generally a fan of in a concert hall. It's true he would have got lost in the blistering maelstrom without it, but there were times when his voice, emanating from a pair of tall angled amps hanging on either side of the stage, sounded distorted or indistinct from my seat in a side box.

Above: Conductor Daniela Candillari. Photo by Gareth Jones.

Elsewhere there was excellent and very versatile vocal work from the eight-strong Exaudi ensemble as a babbling, roiling, occasionally keening soundscape of snippets from real séance transcripts of the time and traditional religious text (Mozart’s Requiem inevitably springs to mind, and Simpson's own lacrimosa was very fine) along with more indistinct sounds. A glimpse of paradise or purgatory? Perhaps only Milton would be able to say for sure.

The oratorio was preceded, in a sharp contrast, by Elgar’s light and lilting Serenade for Strings (ah, the sound of home!) with Candillari showing both precision and warmth and burnishing the work’s keen dynamics.

After the interval she brought similar warmth and precision to Sibelius’s Second Symphony in an intelligent and absorbing performance which also showed her obvious rapport with the orchestra, so I hope we see her back many times at Hope Street.

The opening, sunny, allegretto had great momentum and drive, a honeyed clarinet line from Miguel Ramos Salvado and some toothsome brass, while the following andante’s clean and urgent pizzicato grandmother’s footsteps in the strings and a yearning bassoon melody were crisply juxtaposed by the radiant second theme, with the movement’s powerful agitation reaching a majestic climax under Candillari's baton.

A bucolic oboe passage from Helena Mackie, the sweetness sweeping through the wider winds, was the calm in the storm of what was a delightfully cinematic vivacissimo, and the finale, its soaring melodies beautifully spun, was a fitting and uplifting end to an evening of vivid light and darkness.