Composer Mark Simpson on his debut opera, Pleasure
Millennials, eh? Always tweeting, worrying and... writing operas. At just 27, award-winning composer Mark Simpson has written his first chamber opera, Pleasure. He tells us why its setting, story and scoring should change your ideas of what opera can be.
It’s not every day you call a composer to talk about opera. Indeed, it’s not every day said composer is Mark Simpson: a man who, at just 27 years old, is already 12 years into his professional career. A man who, by the time he was sitting his A Levels, had won both the BBC Young Musician and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year competitions and was already making waves in the classical world.
Interviewing someone who has achieved so much so young is a little intimidating, to say the least. However, seconds into the conversation and Simpson’s cheery Scouse lilt is enough to put anyone at ease; he is humble, down-to-earth and speaks about his work with endless enthusiasm.
Perhaps this grounded sense of self comes from Simpson’s background, growing up in Liverpool. As a child, he was given free peripatetic music lessons to learn to play the clarinet, which sparked his interest in classical music.
"There was a very clearly defined infrastructure in Liverpool at the time which meant that you could, essentially, rise up the ranks and develop for free," he explains. "But you could do it at a good pace and with a level of teaching which was conducive to good learning. On Saturdays the local music support service had a school where everyone would get together and play. So it was just really exciting and fun and I made a lot of friends."
Listen to an extract of Israfel by Mark Simpson, which premiered in 2015
From there, Simpson’s love of classical music blossomed. The first time he heard Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was one of the defining moments in his career: "I had no idea what it was, but it just completely blew me away and I had to know more about it. This whole world just opened up to me so I started buying scores, going to concerts and playing more."
Now a critically acclaimed clarinettist and composer, Simpson has made his first foray into the world of opera with Pleasure.
The making of Pleasure
The idea was initially imagined long before Simpson knew anything about the genre, and he spent years learning about and researching opera before putting his own piece on stage. A chamber opera, this particular type is for small forces; with just four singers and 11 instrumentalists, Pleasure is designed specifically for small spaces – not main opera houses.
"By the time I had a broader sense of what the operatic world was, I’d become increasingly passionate about my own idea and I realised that this kind of story is what opera needs at the moment," says Simpson of Pleasure, which isn’t exactly your typical opera.
For starters, it’s set in a gay nightclub in Liverpool. Written in English with a libretto by Melanie Challenger, Pleasure tracks the journeys of four central characters: an omniscient toilet attendant, an angry soul searching for answers, a bohemian intellectual and a flamboyant drag queen. The story itself grew out of a real conversation Simpson had with a toilet attendant in a club in Liverpool, a maternal lady to whom he felt he could open up. Looking around at the people in the club, he became interested in the idea that the pursuit of pleasure can become a means of escape: Where is the barrier between just having fun and running away from reality?
"All these ideas presented themselves and I just became really interested in this mad world which I thought would work really well for opera," he says. "Opera isn’t real. It’s difficult to have realistic situations simply because the singers are always singing. There’s always got to be a reason for the character to be singing in a heightened sense of emotion – otherwise it should just be a play. In this setting, it’s a given that there’s always going to be this heightened sense of emotion, either because people are pissed, emotional or running away from something. There was already the impetus there to have the emotional drive that I was searching for within the piece."
A new canon: contemporary opera
It’s clear that Pleasure pushes the boundaries of what conventional opera is, at least with the story if not the music. But Simpson is not alone in forging a new wave. Inspired by Mark Anthony Turnage’s Greek – a cockney retelling of the Oedipus myth set in 1980s London – and Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face, he joins a number of composers creating contemporary opera with relatable stories for a modern audience.
Producing a contemporary opera is not without its challenges, however, and Simpson makes no attempt to mask the amount of effort it takes to bring all the elements together.
"Opera is a difficult art form and there are so many disciplines that come into play," he says. "It’s like a balancing act and you have to keep the music, the words, the drama going at the same time. Some things can go out of kilter sometimes.
"It was always important for me to have a story where there was a dramatic goal, where you could build up a relationship with these characters on stage and empathise with them and feel what they were going through."
Opera of the North
Often viewed as a preserve of the privileged, opera can be alienating as an art form. Acutely aware of this attitude, Simpson is determined to change the landscape by bringing gritty working class characters into opera. Though set in Liverpool, Pleasure is not specific to the city but to Northern England in general: "It’s a working class opera if anything," he says.
This may be the case, but writing a working class opera doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll attract a working class audience. By and large, working class people don’t think opera is for them and, until recently, they’d be right. So what would the composer say to someone who isn’t convinced?
"Firstly, the storyline is brilliant. Mel and I spent such a long time crafting this so it has a real dramatic arc to it and it feels like a lived experience."
But it’s his musical approach that is most interesting. With a score that borrows from the lyrical quality of the most successful musical theatre songwriters, such as Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown, Simpson has set out to make his opera accessible to all. "I’ve tried to find a hybrid version that straddles both the musical theatre world and contemporary opera," he says. "The musical world isn’t alienating, it’s not avant garde or abrasive. This is the most accessible piece of work I’ve done but at the same time it’s not so far leftfield as to be a typical musical."
Produced as part of a three-year partnership between Opera North, Aldeburgh Music and the Royal Opera House, Mark Simpson’s Pleasure promises to help open up a form many see as elitist. With his debut piece – hopefully the first of many – this Liverpool-born composer has chosen to do something different, aiming to break down class barriers within the operatic and classical world and make the point that art should be for everyone, not just the privileged.
Pleasure is at Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, 28-3 April; Liverpool Playhouse, 4 May; Britten Studio, Aldeburgh, 7 May and Lyric Hammersmith, London, 12-14 May
operanorth.co.uk/productions/pleasure