Mark Simpson has said that extramusical ideas or narrative structures help his music ‘flow’ more easily. The only work on this collection of chamber and instrumental pieces dating from 2006 to 2014 that doesn’t have some form of non-musical starting point is Nur Musik (‘Just music’), written for the RLPO’s 10/10 Ensemble in 2008 when Simpson was only just emerging from his teens.

You can hear the difference. I can, at least. Simpson has an awful lot of music inside him and plenteous discipline when it comes to writing it down. Nur Musik – the biggest score here but not the longest – is intentionally ‘dense, dark and murky’ at its outset, but that only throws into focus how lucid the composer is when fired by a story or distinct atmosphere. Perhaps that has honed his ability to keep protagonists (instruments) out of each other’s way. His use of space and silence is notable, as are his gift for melody (check Night Music, 2014), his ability to ratchet up drama and his refreshing lack of inhibition in reaching for orthodoxies of style or tonality. Some composers might consider the clarinet-writing around 8'00" in Echoes and Embers (2012) too vernacular or inelegant; I love its grit.

However adept Simpson is at hitting upon something unusually ear-catching or fertile, rarely does he dwell on or overwork it. Examples of that lie within Ariel (2009), a response to Sylvia Plath’s minatory poetry collection of the same name and, to my ears, the standout piece here. It will be interesting to hear how Simpson hones these clear but perhaps jumpy and ever-so-slightly unsettled elements of a compositional voice in the coming years; you might already hear that more distinctively than I do. Either way, this is high-quality music. And in case you need reminding, Simpson can play that clarinet too.