"...the final and most important work, the song cycle Ad Ora Incerta. In his setting of four poems by Primo Levi meditating on the holocaust, Simon Bainbridge creates a soundscape painfully evocative of bleakeness and desolation. His symbiotic partnering of mezzo soprano with a bassoon soloist was mesmerising:Susan Bibkley delivered the words with the detachment that is Bainbridge's equivalent of Levi's distilled objectivity, the only means for him to fulfill his intensely felt obligation as a survivor to bear witness to the almost unutterable truth of the death camps. Against this, bassoonist Dorian Cooke's threnody gave voice to the anguish of heart and spirit. Throughout the evening, Jac van Steen's authoritative conducting was an inspiration to the BBC NOW, but his realisation of the symphonic scale of Bainbridge's conception was masterly. A harrowing but profoundly affecting performance."

Rian Evans, The Guardian
26th January 2004

"Simon Bainbridge's Ad Ora Incerta, plumbed a depth of tragedy and mourning with the subtlest musical means. When I first heard these settings of Primo Levi's poetic meditations on Auschwitz, they seemed incidently sophisticated as if these unspeakable scenes were being represented in gold thread on spun silk. But on this occasion I was able to pass through that sumptuous surface to something archetypal and utterly stark. Much of the credit for this must go to the performers, particularly the soprano Susan Bickley, whose bleached-out impassive tone was the perfect counterfoil to the music's fevered intensity."

Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph
26th January 2004

"The Four Primo Levi Settings are scored for a chamber ensemble and sound equally intense, equally haunting…Required listening if ever there was."

Stephen Pettitt, BBC Music Magazine
1st December 1999

"These two sets of songs are some of the most ambitious and daring British works of recent times."

Matthew Rye, The Telgraph
16th October 1999

“…a full half-hour of music, though seemingly more compact, and surely his finest achievement to date. The last song, “Buna”, had a symphonic breadth and trajectory that was a major compositional tour de force in itself. As the focus of three preceding shorter movements, it gave the piece a rock-like consistency, though spun from the pristine, whirling textures Bainbridge has made his own.”

Nicholas Williams, The Independent
1st March 1995

"...Bainbridge's Chant, a BBC Millenium commission written for York Minster's holy spaces. The amplified voices of 12 solo voices echoed from seven loudspeakers. Droning strings and other instruments ducked and weaved or built up in layers. The springboard for every note is a hymn to the Virgin by the 12th-century wonder Hildegarde of Bingen; she should almost be credited as co-composer. Ecstatic and static both at once, the sounds spun some magic..."

Geoff Brown, The Times
6th August 2004

"...Wednesday's late-night concert by the BBC Singers with the city of London Sinfonia under Stephen Cleobury saw the London premiere of Simon Bainbridge's Chant, a 1999 commission designed for the vast space of York Minster. With its 12 amplified voices beaming in n the audience from all directions, it made a striking impression in the Albert Hall, though it's use of the plainchant Ave Generosa by the 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen seemed atmosphere-inducing..."

George Hall, Daily Telegraph
6th August 2004

“Bainbridge transforms Hildegard's chant into a cascade of chromaticism and embellishes it with modernist clusters…The music moves with infinite subtlety from unadulterated plainchant to electronic fantasy; as if the past is leaking through the pores of the present…there was a numinous thrill in this music.”

Tom Service, The Guardian
6th September 2002

"Bainbridge's hauntingly austere Chant, commissioned for a performance in York Minster in 2000, paid magical homage to the 12th century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, with 12 singers gently metamorphosing and decorating a piece by her over a subtle orchestral layer, their voices transported to speakers set around the auditorium as if mysticaly disembodied."

Stephen Pettitt, The Evening Standard
5th September 2002

“Chant takes as its cue the music of the 12th-century Abbotess Hildegard of Bingen, specifically the monodic votive hymn for the Blessed Virgin, "Ave, generosa". The Bainbridge develops, drawing on its qualities of fluidity, but also breaking the line into distinct, long-breathed phrases, so that the piece consists of a sequence of self-contained statements, a ritual whose aesthetic, but not its sound, bears some relationship to the spiritual minimalism of Arvo Pärt… The effect was mesmerising, creating a timeless sculptural structure, at one level static, at another flowing. This was the perfect location for the work.”

Stephen Pettitt, The Financial Times
1st November 1999

"...slight, though beautifully made: Simon Bainbridge's Cheltenham Fragments, part of the collection of 20 miniatures commissioned to mark Michael Berkeley's 10th and final festival as a director."

Andrew Clements , The Guardian
16th August 2004

“Nobody writes concerti grossi any more, which is a pity, as there is much vitality to the baroque form perfected by Handel, Corelli and Bach, whose Brandenburg Suites are concerti grossi in all but name. Simon Bainbridge calls the Northern Sinfonia "an orchestra of virtuosos", and his new piece, Concerti Grossi, was a 20-minute exercise designed to test the dexterity of the players to the limit. It didn't sound particularly baroque: Bainbridge's tonal palette seemed in equal parts Miles Davis and Debussy, while a palindromic structure brought the material full circle in the manner of Berg's Lulu. Yet it operated on the concerto grosso principle whereby the pulse is relayed from one group of soloists to another like electrical charges round a nervous system. It featured exemplary control of depth-of-field, with clusters of instruments snapping briefly into focus.”

Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
7th June 2010

“Jazz-classical mash-ups can be the equivalent of bad fusion food, sticking two flavours together that add nothing to each other. Not so Simon Bainbridge’s new work, which makes the two worlds coalesce into something new to both…. Counterpoints is not really a concerto, even though there is a nod to the genre at the very beginning, when Gomez led off with an unaccompanied episode reminiscent of a classical cadenza. Then he put his bow down and continued in jazz-player style, subtly amplified. Out of that grew a series of highly textured episodes in which the bass set the agenda, sometimes playing exactly what Bainbridge wrote, sometimes improvising. A fast, walking bass invited cascading, staccato phrases from the orchestra; a slower, more rhapsodic bass passage turned into a haunting quartet with piano, oboe and a percussionist playing the marimba with a bow. Three cheers for a classical piece that seems to grow from jazz rather than merely to appropriate it.”

Erica Jeal, The Guardian
19th November 2015

““Gradually the piece acquired momentum, and an intriguing colour reminiscent of Gil Evans’s jazz scores but with a startling admixture of Baroque oboe… For a moment, one felt these two musical worlds really could meet after all.”

Ivan Hewitt
19th November 2015

“In his Diptych, Bainbridge has gone exploring the sheer diversity of subtle combinations available from a hundred musicians, and come up with music that fascinates by its quietly mutating colours and almost heroic restraint, as though confident that the story of what it all means can be told on another occasion.

Despite the name, Diptych is a work of two unequal parts, like a prelude and an elaboration. Bainbridge prefers that they be played separately, as they were at the BBC Symphony Orchestra's lucidly prepared premiere, one at the start of each half. Both take visual metaphors as their starting point: images that break up and reassemble in unexpected but coherent ways.

The first deals in quiet chords and even quieter articulations of the space between them, often just with faint percussion rolls. Horn colour strengthens the palette and achieves a temporary dominance, but there is no melody or pulse, just flurries of notes rippling the surface. Harmonies recall Debussy, particularly Jeux, but with an implicit sense of evolution that steals up as the music proceeds.

Part two sets out from similar stillness - separation makes it like a reminder rather than a continuity - but soon sustains a multi-layered concentration. It remains quiet, but activity is purposeful and eventually settles round a long melodic line that comes and goes.”

Robert Maycock, The Independent
15th February 2007

“Simon Bainbridge's new orchestral work, Diptych, is in two parts that the composer says he would prefer to be heard separately. In this premiere performance by the BBC Symphony under David Robertson, they were positioned as the opening items in each half.

The first has its visual starting point in reflections of Venice seen in the canals when their surfaces break up and re-form. In Bainbridge's musical analogue, harmonic pillars dissolve into the polyphonic lines that form the music's surface, then solidify once more - a process repeated many times. Bainbridge's delicate harmonic and instrumental palette is finely deployed.

The second panel is also concerned with fragmentation: here, of a large ensemble into three separate chamber-orchestra-sized units, which subdivide further into smaller groups and solos.”

George Hall, The Guardian
14th February 2007

“Normally it's only at "electronic music concerts" that the sounds are literally unfathomable, in the sense that you can't connect them with anything you're looking at. But some composers have a gift for making the familiar instruments of the orchestra seem equally extraterritorial. The 54-year-old British composer Simon Bainbridge is one of them.

The very first sound of Diptych, his new two-movement piece premièred by the BBC Symphony Orchestra on Friday, was nothing more exotic than high trilling strings and a high oboe. But it registered as a glistening smear, followed immediately by a kind of afterglow of cymbals and triangle. The composer tells us the piece was inspired by the canals of Venice, which give the city back in a million reflections, sometimes still like a mirror, sometimes wavy and prismatic.

Proper modernist that he is, Bainbridge removes the local reference and goes for the abstract sensation. There wasn't even a hint of a gondola song, just the constant play of mysterious brushed chords against silence.

The second panel of this Diptych was much more extended and intricate. Now angular melodic lines emerged from the procession of chords, their corners picked out in highlights of different colours; a harp here, a muted trumpet there.

The delicacy of the playing, and the sensitive rubato engendered by the conductor David Robertson, was a wonder to behold.”

Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph
13th February 2007

“That dark character cropped up again with a more overtly mournful and sometimes eerie cast in Simon Bainbridge’s “Four Primo Levi Settings” (1996) for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, viola and piano. These Italian settings dance between gracefulness and ponderousness, and Mary Nessinger moved deftly between those extremes, giving her best performance in “Da RM Rilke,” the cycle’s haunting, gently chromatic finale. “

Allan Kozinn, New York Times
18th April 2007

“Bainbridge has definitely come of age, and the somber intensity of Levi’s texts obviously inspired him to produce what I believe to be his finest work so far. Exquisitely written, uncompromisingly intense and genuinely moving, this is one the finest song cycles British music has produced since Britten.”

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Paris Transatlantic Magazine
1st March 2000

“One might imagine that Simon Bainbridge would have exhausted his Primo Levi vein in the overwhelmingly intense settings he made with orchestral accompaniment last year (Ad ora incerta). But something was evidently left unsaid, and this has now borne fruit in a new cycle… Some composers escape from overpowering impressions into their opposite: the lightweight or the abstract. Bainbridge has simply written four more songs of the same dark intensity as before… These are again beautiful if draining pieces, 15 minutes or so of exquisite gloom, sustained with real mastery, decorative but never straying into the picturesque.”

Stephen Walsh, The Independent
1st July 1996

“Guitar Concertos are problematic. Unless the soloist is giong to be amplified then balance is difficult…In his new concerto, commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group as part of its Sound Investment scheme, Simon Bainbridge gets round the difficulties by keeping his scoring very light and eliminating accompaniment altogether at the very start of the work…shapely, intriguing and musically more weighty than its modest proportions suggest.”

Andrew Clements, The Guardian
1st November 1998

“What always makes this composer’s works so rewarding is the clarity of texture, the purposefulness of direction. He selects material that remains recognisable throughout the work. There’s not a hint of intellectual showing-off, just an inexorable sense of logic enhanced by unabashed lyricism. If compositional angst was the evening’s general tone, the [London] Sinfonietta [Michael Thompson the brilliant soloist] here raised temperatures with a heat-generating performance.”

Annette Morreau, The Independent
1st August 1997

“Bainbridge is explicitly concerned with the musical sights, to the extent of borrowing his title from Simon Schama’s most recent book…the main idea is a three-note call for the horn with a lyrical extension, which is constantly modified and developed in fresh contexts. The orchestral writing is lithe and linear, without the kind of texture-building ideas that Bainbridge has used in his recent pieces for large orchestra. There’s another horn, an echo, positioned in the auditorium, whose function becomes increasingly important as the work unfolds. In the final page, the two coalesce ecstatically with the solo horn swathed in the sympathetic reverberations of an amplified snare drum; it’s a striking and unexpected ending to an impressive piece.“

Andrew Clements, The Guardian
1st November 1995

“The music, too, is a collection of shards, vertical fragments (derived from a cycle of 12-note chords) that Bainbridge compares to the differently angled “mental snapshots” one takes on entering a new space, and that gradually reveal a unified structure. Just as the museum shards form a building that stands up despite seeming to fly apart, so the musical ones are held firmly in place, yet their fragmentariness is never remotely disguised. Silences, often long, punctuate them. The continuity is an elemental, stop-start ritual, governed by the geometry of the Golden Section. What creates the beauty of the piece, which Bainbridge regards essentially as a live sound installation, is the ultra-refined instrumental coloration obtained from four identical sextets (flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin and cello), disposed in a circle around the room, the conductor in the centre, and modified and diffused by the ultra-sophisticated real-time electronics of Sound Intermedia.

...my memory of the première (followed almost immediately by the deuxième) will be one of rare poetic austerity.”

Paul Driver, The Sunday Times
6th May 2007

“The main attraction was the first London performance of a new work by Simon Bainbridge, Music Space Reflection - Manchester. Attracted by the spatial effects achieved by the architect Daniel Liebeskind, he tries in this piece to marry music and architecture. Much of the score is silent, just as a building is filled with empty space, and the music takes the form of fragments of sound, sometimes echoing round the hall as live electronics.”

Richard Fairman, Financial Times
2nd May 2007

“Realising that, when absorbing a new space, the eye takes many mental "snapshots" from a range of vantage points, Bainbridge attempts to translate this process sonically, into a series of harmonically ambivalent musical fragments which, like a kaleidoscope, gradually accumulate and impose themselves on the ear.

Music Space Reflection - Manchester remained a coolly ambiguous though fascinating experience.”

Lynne Walker, The Independent
2nd May 2007

“The orchestra played in four equally balanced blocks across the platform, amplified sensitively by microphones and speakers in unusual formations, such as above and behind the audience. The resonances were quite bizarre, genuinely imparting a sense that sound was coming from four dimensions, and adding a low, rumble giving a depth of sound not otherwise possible from conventional instruments. It felt as though we were hearing the very pulse of the earth. Sounds Intermedia, led by David Shephard, were playing electronics as an instrument, integral to the growth of the music. They expanded and deepened what the orchestra played. This was far more interesting than devices like adding pre-recorded sound.

The music unfolds against this deep reverberation, moving swiftly in different directions, sometimes creating angular dissonances, sometimes rotating in whimsical flurries. Sometimes the sounds turn on a sudden pivot, changing direction as if they were rounding corners. You don’t need visual clues, but you can “feel” glass and metal in the clear, sharp textures, solid forms against transparent. This is very expressive music, though not at all “programmatic”: it’s far too imaginative and quirky. Just as architecture is a means of giving shape to “empty” space, even silence is part of Bainbridge’s concept. At the end, Masson conducts bars where sounds gradually dissipate, but even then, there’s a structure to the way they fade into the computer-enhanced hum, so understated that only sensitive ears can pick it up. In nature, too, there are many sounds almost imperceptible to human ears, but they are there, nonetheless, and affect us subliminally.”

Anne Ozorio, Seen and Heard
1st May 2007

“Anyone who has stood in the blank darkness of Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin will understand why a composer might strive to express its austere mood in music. This was not the only building that inspired Simon Bainbridge's Music Space Reflection. Another was Liebeskind's Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, where the work was premiered. [...] The full range of aural possibilities promised by the composer before the performance, such as echoes tossed electronically around the hall was (...) exquisitely played by the London Sinfonietta.”

Fiona Maddocks, Evening Standard
1st May 2007

“The piece is strikingly different from anything Bainbridge has composed before. Much of his music is linear, deriving its weight and complexity from the layering of instrumental lines. But the emphasis in Music Space Reflection is on the vertical, as if to establish an aural point of reference within the dizzying geometries of Liebeskind's buildings. Music Space Reflection is a restrained, bleak processional, whose mood, as Bainbridge revealed here in a platform interview, was influenced by the sombre purposes of so many of the architect's buildings.

What begins as a halting series of chords, shared between the four spatially separated sextets of instrumentalists (all identical, with pairs of woodwind, brass and strings), gradually thaws into some of Bainbridge's typically busy filigree. Yet the music remains static and meditative, though there is a brief climax, coloured by electronic bell sounds and brass, before the piece relapses into a final silence. Among the War Museum's display cases and icons of war - a field gun, a tank, a fire tender - it made a curious, rather plaintive statement.”

Andrew Clements, The Guardian
30th April 2007

“The opening gestures -- poised, fluttery figures that darted from one section of the orchestra to another -- created an immediate tension that never let up. There was freedom and joy in the piece, and Wednesday's performance brought out a dynamic balance between classicism and disruption, between sheer aural pleasure and a driving life-force.”

Tamara Bernstein, Toronto Star
3rd March 2007

“It was good to hear a contemporary piece that fizzed with intellectual and bodily energy.”

Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph
12th September 2005

“Softly arousing our senses to the finer nuances of orchestral sound, his deftly woven chords, flecked with guitar and mandolin timbres, moved slowly yet purposefully in preparation for a broad melodic statement. Arriving it seemed too short, and left the listener greedy for more.”

Nicholas Williams, The Independent
27th October 2000

“Simon Bainbridge's Scherzi…is a six-minute whispering whirlwind of fluttering strings, with splashes of plucked and percussive colour”

Barry Millington, The Times
24th October 2000

“Simon Bainbridge's short Scherzi is a scintillating study in orchestral sonority, shimmering with trills and light-catching fragments.”

Geoffrey Norris, The Daily Telegraph
24th October 2000

“...the work’s power and unbridled passion tapped by all involved left the audience mesmerized.”

Daniele Sahr, Music Web International
30th March 2013

“A Hilliard commission, Tenebrae is a masterly, chilling setting of Paul Celan’s famous post-Holocaust poem on the theme of human suffering. Bainbridge’s setting is one of his most arresting, infused, as in his earlier setting of Primo Levi, with original power and compellingly tormented beauty. As well as the interactions that interpret the title, ‘shadows’, as a “continuously shifting perspective between the four voices and strings”, the finely-honed harmonic sand rhythmic gestures convey both the essence and detail of Celan’s text, which takes the form of a prayer that inverts the conventional human/divine relationship. Eerie, disembodied, the voices seem at first separate from strings, yet they emerge more confidently, eventually taking the lead. Strings and voices move in blocs like finely calibrated crystals, suspended in silences. As in the hushed shimmers of Bainbridge’s orchestral Diptych, inspired by Venetian reflections, sound and silence are coupled in an intimate balance of time and space.”

Malcolm Miller, Tempo
5th April 2010

“A word for another brazen conjunction, that of the Hilliard Ensemble, the male-voice quartet whose repertory stretches from the Middle Ages to tomorrow, and the Arditti Quartet, custodians of the contemporary string quartet. Jointly at the Wigmore Hall, they premiered Simon Bainbridge's Tenebrae, an austere, Nono-ish, deeply felt setting of a Paul Celan post-Holocaust poem.”

Paul Driver, The Sunday Times
15th November 2009

“The use of silence, and of the strings to cushion the gentle, overlapping chanting of the voices on eerie chords, seemed to suggest an "otherworld" shadowing of the human.”

Richard Morrison, The Times
10th November 2009

“The nostalgia seemed directed toward the 1970s, a time of material complexity and simple-mindedness.

... fascinatedly detailed. “

Guy Dammann, The Guardian
20th August 2012

“...a sizable cantata to a text by John Ross which offers a highly arresting commentary on Bosch's fabled alter-piece. A spoken 'Prologue: Hieronymus Bosch, the Gardener', its recollection of time and place vividly rendered by Sam West, leads into 'Panel One: The Creation of the World', in which mezzo and countertenor anticipate the opening-out of the design to reveal 'panel Two: The Garden of Eden', with the solo singers combining in an eerie evocation of the artist's voice that is intensified in 'Panel three: the Garden of Earthly Delights', featuring an array of imaginative instrumental and choral textures in the depiction of enveloping decadence and decay; leading inevitably to 'Panel Four: The Music of Hell', with an anguished response from countertenor only partly offset by the mezzo's dark-hued fatalism as a future where "the garden gate shuts, on the road ahead" is stoically contemplated.”

Richard Whitehouse, www.classicalsource.com
18th August 2012

“Bainbridge’s Three Pieces, far from easy because musically clear and therefore exposed, were a real success, well prepared, and done with much refinement and intensity. On the surface they look a curious trio. The first piece flirts with the rising flute motive in the “Abschied” finale to The Song of the Earth, and in fact is so close to the Mahler in feeling that it soon becomes it and has to stop. But the two other pieces, a “shimmering” Scherzo followed by what Bainbridge calls a sombre “orchestra chorale”, pursue ideas suggested by “Abschied” : above all, that of a sung line threading a more or less unbroken course through accompanying traceries which, at the same time, map out an inert or slow-moving harmonic field… Much of this is beautiful, and always the effect is precise, étude-like.”

Stephen Walsh, The Independent
1st February 1998

“...haunting, ghostly and subtle.“

Richard Morrison, The Times
9th June 2009