Elgar’s much-loved Serenade for Strings was given its unofficial 1892 premiere by the amateurs of the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestral Class. The perfect piece of salon Victoriana, it was an ideal more-tea-vicar, bone-china-and-bread-and-butter scene-setter for the cataclysmic eruptions of Mark Simpson’s The Immortal.
Inspired by Victorian occultism, Simpson’s 2015 oratorio invites its audience to a Victorian seance. Texts collated by Melanie Challenger represent the scattered anxieties, pleas and nonsense of the automatic writing produced by mediums of the time. Against these are set the words of Frederic Myers: founder of the Society for Psychical Research, obsessed with the afterlife since the suicide of his childhood sweetheart.
