Obituary, Simon Bainbridge (1952-2021)

The British composer and teacher Simon Bainbridge, who was Head of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music for eight years and had works premiered at the BBC Proms and the Aldeburgh Festival, has died aged 68.

Born in London in 1952, Bainbridge was educated at Highgate School, the Royal College of Music (with John Lambert) and Tanglewood, where he was mentored by Gunther Schuller. His breakthrough work was the ensemble piece Spirogyra, written in 1970 and performed to great acclaim at Aldeburgh the following year; its impact led to a commission from André Previn, with other early successes including the 1976 Viola Concerto, written for Walter Trampler.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s Bainbridge composed a string of large-scale works, including the Fantasia for Double Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta commission Concertante in Moto Perpetuo (both written in 1983), and the 1994 orchestral song-cycle Ad Ora Incerta, which sets texts by the Italian writer and Holocaust-survivor Primo Levi; the latter work prompted Gramophone to describe him as 'an uncommonly fine musical dramatist', and won the Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition in 1997.

In 2005 his Scherzi (commissioned five years earlier by the BBC Symphony Orchestra to mark their seventieth birthday) was performed at the Last Night of the Proms, with The Telegraph declaring that 'it was good to hear a contemporary piece that fizzed with intellectual and bodily energy'. Other major works from the past two decades included Voiles for the unusual combination of bassoon and string ensemble (2001), the thirty-minute orchestral work Diptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (inspired by Hieronymus Bosch and premiered at the Proms in 2012), and Music Space Reflection, a collaboration with the architect Daniel Libeskind which was performed in Manchester, Copenhagen, London and Toronto.

From 1999 until 2007, Bainbridge was Head of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and also taught extensively in the US, at institutions including Yale University, the University of Louisville (Kentucky), the Boston Conservatory of Music, and the Juilliard School.

Bainbridge died on 2nd April and is survived by his wife, the soprano Lynda Richardson.

Simon Bainbridge - a selected discography