The Power of Robert Simpson

After the Hyperion recording of Robert Simpson’s Ninth Symphony (1986) was released in 1988, David Fanning wrote in Gramophone magazine that ‘Simpson had found what Sibelius in the end seemingly despaired of finding—a way of uniting the essentials of symphonic momentum with the essentials of modern consciousness’. Such high claims—Fanning also described Simpson’s music as ‘uniquely invigorating’—were by no means exceptional. According to Donald Macauley, ‘a poll of readers of the BBC Music Magazine [in 1999] asking them to nominate their favourite twentieth century work and composer, gave Simpson’s Ninth joint third place alongside Britten’s Peter Grimes and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, while among composers he ranked fifth, after Bartók, Elgar, Prokofiev and Richard Strauss’ (p. 174). But just five years later, in 2004, Julian Anderson could describe the same work more ambivalently, as ‘an isolated case of Sibelius-influenced uninterrupted transformation extended to previously unheard-of lengths within a relatively traditional harmonic and orchestral idiom. As such it is an undervalued and underplayed masterpiece by a lone figure in British music’ (The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel Grimley (Cambridge, 2004), p. 211).

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