Mark Simpson (1988-)
Night Music, pour violoncelle et piano
Ariel, pour quatuor à cordes
Barkham Fantasy, pour piano
Echoes and Embers, pour clarinette et piano
Lov(escape), pour clarinette et piano
Un regalo, pour violoncelle
Windflower, pour hautbois
Nur Musik, pour hautbois et ensemble

Leonard Elschenbroich, violoncelle
Alexei Grynyuk, piano
Richard Uttley, piano
Mark Simpson, clarinette
Vikingur Olafsson, piano
Ian Buckle, piano
Nicholas Daniel, hautbois
Guy Johnston, violoncelle
Jonathan Small, hautbois
Quatuor Mercury
Ensemble 10/10
Clark Rundell, direction

This recording of chamber music pieces by 27-year-old composer Mark Simpson features works spanning ten years. All are performed by the musicians and ensembles for whom they were originally written. Mark Simpson's works are most often inspired by dark tones and atmospheres of loss, dreams, hauntings, intimacy and passion and, as with Night Music and Echoes and Embers, often embrace ambiguities of emotion and attitude with extremes of quietude and agitation, of fragility and power. His pieces are also his own musical response to poetry (Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Ted Hughes’ ‘Tales from Ovid’ for Windfl ower) or the mysteries and resonances of place (Barkham Fantasy whose genesis harks back to an eerie farmhouse on Dartmoor, and Nur Musik written during a stay in Berlin). Mark's earliest work on this album, Un Regalo (2004), was written to celebrate the 300th birthday of Guy Johnston's cello and he wrote Love(escape) (2006) for his semi-fi nal recital for the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition.