Mark Simpson

Manchester International Festival presents the world première of The Immortal, a new work for orchestra and chorus by one of Britain’s brightest young composers, Mark Simpson.

Inspired by John Gray’s book The Immortalization Commission, Simpson’s work explores the obsession with death that lies at the heart of the human experience.

Drawing on the so-called ‘Cross Correspondences’, the extraordinary scripts of a series of séances undertaken in the first decades of the 20th century, this oratorio portrays the crisis of faith experienced by Frederick Myers, president of the Society of Psychical Research. Myers’ attempt to prove the existence of an afterlife was made more poignant by his own desperate hope of reuniting with the love of his life, whose untimely death haunted both his life and his work.