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Robert Simpson – An Approaching Centenary

Dec. 01, 2019

Robert Simpson – An Approaching Centenary

2021 marks the centenary of the birth of Robert Simpson, a composer’s composer whose impressively single-minded but now almost entirely neglected body of work is crowned by eleven symphonies and fifteen string quartets.

A distinguished BBC producer and broadcaster in the 1960s and 70s, Simpson also wrote extensively on the work of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius – all composers who influenced his own mission of creating dynamic musical architectures linked to tradition through the gravitational forces of tonality. His unashamedly tonal style, however, was deeply unfashionable, and Simpson’s trenchant criticisms of modernist musical establishment further reinforced an over-simplified image of him as a backward-looking regressive. Listening to his music now, with the benefit of several decades distance, it is clear that the best of his work displays a far more positive and progressive spirit: a burning belief in the ability for the great traditional forms of the past to continue to grow and live on well into the second half of the 20th century and beyond.

Described by the Guardian as ‘one of the best-kept secrets of post-war British music’, Simpson’s eleven symphonies display an incredibly vivid creativity. Simpson never repeats himself; his approach always seems formally and harmonically fresh, without ever slavishly following a tonal agenda.

One of Simpson’s most thrilling and concise statements is the Seventh Symphony, a gritty work from 1977 whose harmonies seethe with troubled energy. Beginning with a determined statement in the bass regions of the orchestra, it ends 28 minutes later with a drawn-out, eerily expressionless C-sharp in the strings. Some wondered whether Simpson was portraying nuclear annihilation or some other apocalyptic event. He answered, ‘The end is C-sharp,’ but added that it could be ‘a picture of people not facing a fact that stares them in the face.’


(Symphony No. 7/Robert Simpson/Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Brian Wright, conductor) 

Other Faber works include his epic fifty-minute Symphony No.9 – which has been conducted by Sir Simon Rattle – and the String Quartet No.9, which also lasts almost an hour and takes the form of twenty-one variations and a fugue on a theme of Haydn.

To learn more about Robert Simpson, visit fabermusic.com 

Robert Simpson
Symphony No. 7 (1977)
for chamber/small orchestra
2.2.2.2–2.2.0.0–timp–str
28' 

Symphony No. 9 (1986)
for orchestra
2.pic.2.ca.2.bcl.2.cbn–4.3.3.1–timp–str
50' 

String Quartet No. 9 (1982)
for string quartet
57' 

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